


Small things about demons

by ThisCat



Series: Transcendence AU [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Babysitting, Demonic summoning, Eye Trauma, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Horrible Deaths, Magic Tricks, Medicinal Drug Use, One Shot Collection, Sibling Relationship, Soul-Crushing Sadness, Space Opera, Terrified Parents, accidentally, au-au, endangerment of tiny children, friendly violence, the Flock - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2018-04-21 12:38:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 46
Words: 85,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4829432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My small, independent writings from the TAU universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tara

**Author's Note:**

> Written from [this](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/post/129408779110/prompt-the-idiots-that-read-mysterious-cave#notes) prompt. ~1500 words about a Stanford reincarnation.

«Honey, have you seen Tara?»

His wife’s voice stirred Nicholas from his half-dozing at his desk. He looked up and saw her peeking through the door.

“No. Isn’t she in her room?”

“She isn’t,” Elaise answered. She looked worried. “I can’t find her anywhere. Help me out?”

He nodded and stood up to join her in the hallway. He was not too worried, really. Their oldest daughter had a habit of running off without telling anyone, but if her endless curiosity had compelled her to go outside this time…

“Tara!” he called for her, hoping for an answer. None came. He took a quick look around at the doors in the hallway, and saw a door standing slightly ajar.

“Did you open the cellar door?”

Elaise whipped her head around, and when she looked back at him, she looked scared.

“I didn’t- you don’t think she’s- but she knows not to go down there!”

He laid a hand on her shoulder to calm her down, but he had to admit he was worried himself. The cellar was not a place for little girls.

“Probably not, but we should check anyway.”

Together, they walked through the door and down the stairs. The door at the bottom stood ajar as well, but through it, they could hear their daughter’s voice. It was slow and stilted, like it was whenever she tried reading, a skill she had greatly improved over the last week. Nicholas kept his voice low.

“Did she bring her book down here?”

Elaise looked even more scared now.

“No… no I think it was in her room, but the books down here are…”

Nicholas took a sharp breath and pushed open the door. Most of the books in the cellar were harmless, if a bit above Tara’s reading level, but the last one they had left out was more arcane than the novels. Now that her voice was clear enough to make out the words, though, it was blindingly clear what she was reading.

“ma- meam. Um… dico?… no… men? Nomen… ves.. vestu…”

Latin. She was reading Latin, and not just any kind of Latin either. Fuck! Nicholas’ heart felt like it stopped. What the hell was he supposed to do? Elaise did not stop to think, but tried to rush around the bookcase the door was hidden behind, but if he was right…

He caught up to her, put a hand over her mouth and pulled them both to a stop in the shadow of the bookcase. From there, they could see the entire scene.

In the middle of the room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, stood the work desk with the offending book laying open. Tara stood on the chair, her back to them, leaning over in concentration. And just as he had feared, the invocation she was reading was almost finished, and the shadows had already started gathering. Elaise went limp from fear in his arms, and he felt his own heart crawl up his throat as the most powerful demon in existence materialized in front of their daughter.

Unlike in any stories they had heard, Alcor’s entrance was not the least bit dramatic. One moment the air was empty, the next he was floating there. Easily and quietly, not a breath of air disturbed. He took a quick look around at the room, and for one heart-stopping moment, his eyes met Nicholas’ before they flitted back to Tara. As focused as she was, she had not even noticed his arrival. She just kept sounding out the words on the page.

He floated closer to the desk to look, and she noticed him.

“Who’re you?”

Nicholas flinched at the question, but Alcor just smiled. It was a kind smile. He reached out and turned a page in the book, then he tapped the picture of himself that was drawn there.

“I’m Alcor. It’s nice to meet you.”

Tara looked back and forth between the demon and the picture a few times before she gasped.

“You’re from the book?”

Alcor blinked once and started laughing. Nicholas was stricken by how human it sounded. Every record he had heard made Alcor’s voice out to be horrifyingly demonic, and his laughter even more so, but this had nothing but a faint echo. He even held a hand up to obscure his sharp teeth from the little girl.

“Yes,” he said when he was done, “I suppose I am, in a way.”

Tara squared her shoulders.

“Why’re you laughing?” she said indignantly.

Alcor put his hands up in defense.

“Oh, I’m not laughing at you, Tara,” _He knew her name! How- why?_ “I’m just surprised by how smart you are. Did you read the words to get me here?” He flipped the page back and tapped the invocation.

Tara nodded.

“You’re very good,” he said, “How old are you?”

“Four and a half!” she answered.

“Four and a half! And already that good at reading? You really _are_ smart, aren’t you?”

Tara beamed at him, or at least it looked like she did from the way she perked up and bounced slightly.

“When did you learn to read, then?”

“Umm… just a little while ago, but I’ve already read ‘The Little Beebear’ and ‘Why is my Hair Green?’ so much that I know them by heart!”

“I see,” he nodded. “Then I suppose you went out to find something new to read, and found this, right?”

She nodded again.

“Do you like it?” he asked, and she paused, thinking hard.

“Umm… it has lots of funny words, and nice pictures! But I don’t really understand it so much.”

“Hm, well, that’s probably because it’s in a different language.”

She gasped again.

“Really? Did I read another language? Wow!”

“You sure did, little lady. But it’s not as much fun to read books you don’t understand, is it?”

She shook her head.

“And it’s a grown-up book too, even though it has pictures. Say… does your parents know you’re down here?”

Tara froze. Then she slowly shook her head.

“No.”

“And why not?”

“Umm… because I’m not allowed. Please don’t tell them.”

For a moment, Alcor’s eyes flitted back up to the two of them in the shadows, and his smile widened a fraction.

“Of course not, I’m not a tattletale! You know what, though? I have a book I think you’d really like.”

With that, he pulled his hat down and started rifling through it. Tara laughed.

“You can’t have a book in that!”

He stopped and looked at her with one raised eyebrow.

“Why not?”

“Because it’d fall on your head, duh.”

“Mhm? And what if it’s a magic hat?”

“Really?”

“Sure! Just look at this,” he said, and pulled a small, brown rabbit out of the hat. Alcor and the rabbit looked at each other for a few seconds before Alcor exclaimed, “You’re not a book!” and put it down on the desk. Tara laughed in delight and petted the rabbit.

This time, Alcor put his entire arm into the hat. He closed one eye and put his tongue out the side of his mouth as he searched, and Nicholas was sure he was putting on a show for Tara. They _did_ say Alcor liked kids, didn’t they? Maybe they were actually literal? He hoped so. Alcor kept searching.

“Now… where… Is… that… Aha!”

When he pulled his arm out, it was completely covered in colorful moths.

“Ech” he said, and shook it, and every moth took off at once. Tara squealed in laughter.

Once the flurry of colorful insects had settled, Alcor held the object in his hand out to Tara. It was a small book with bright pictures on the cover. Tara reached out to take it, but he pulled it back.

“Now, Tara, this book also has lots of nice pictures and funny words, and I’m sure you’ll like the stories, besides…” the next thing he said was whispered too quietly for Nicholas and Elaise to hear, “but, if I’m going to give you this I need you to promise me something, okay?”

She nodded again.

“Okay, you gotta promise me you won’t come down here without asking your parents again. If you do that, I’m sure they won’t be angry at you for this. Promise?”

Tara hesitated for a few seconds, then she nodded.

“I promise.”

He smiled, then, and handed her the book. Then he gathered up the rabbit, waved his goodbye, and disappeared in a blip.

Tara climbed down from the chair and walked straight into her mother.

—

The next month, Tara went nowhere without her book. She brought it to kindergarten, kept it beside her on the table at dinner, and slept with it under her pillow. She read the stories in it to her parents, and got a lot better at it as she did. Aside from the fact that the book seemed to hold far more stories than there was room for, it seemed perfectly benign. Though, when Nicholas finally got his hands on it and found a summoning circle and invocation handwritten inside the back cover, signed to Tara by the demon himself, no part of him was surprised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The book Tara got was one named "Tales from the Shepherd". No publishers have ever touched it, but there are a few dozen known copies of it, in five different languages. It's small and white, with a picture of a bunch of sheep in different colors on the cover, and this poem is on the first page:  
> If you find it hard to sleep,  
> or stay awake in fright.  
> Between the mind and dream are sheep,  
> they watch you through the night.  
> You mustn't ever fear the deep,  
> for they will be your light.
> 
> Flipping through it, it has just below thirty pages, but reading it, you can easily reach several hundred. The stories inside vary in age group from children to teens, but can only be read if you're old enough to, and if they fit what you want to read at the moment. Most of the stories are sickeningly sweet things about children or adorable animals, though.  
> Few of the stories have ever been recorded anywhere else, but historians recognize one of them as a kidified and R-rated version of the rise of the Portland mafia.  
> Adults are confused and disturbed, children love it, and the books last forever.


	2. Kitty Hunt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this one's based on some discussion about what Dipper on dipnip would be to people he doesn't like. There is a lot of blood and worse things in this. It was a lot more fun to write than it should be.

Some part far in the back of Dipper’s mind realized that he was drugged into compliance, and that that was why everything felt so nice. That part was very small, though, and had no say in his actions.

His eyes were too blown to see anything properly, but he saw well enough to get by, so it was okay. Everything was okay, actually. Gone were the constant worries and anxieties, the slight fear of his own power. Gone were the demonic compulsions to hurt people. Gone was the overhanging threat of all the knowledge in the universe.

Everything was simple now. He knew where all his loved ones were. He knew that they were safe and happy. One of them was absentmindedly scritching him between the shoulder blades in a way that made him want to purr, so he did, and the world was truly perfect.

After an unknown amount of time, he had no reason to keep track of it, he felt a tug he recognized as a summon. Usually when he was like this, he would ignore summons until they went away, but this one was very insistent. He grumbled in irritation once before he stretched out with a yawn and let himself fall into the summon.

\---

The room was dark and cold. The air was heavy with the swirling emotions of a couple handfuls of people.

Anticipation, excitement, worry, fear, terror, pain.

The terror and pain belonged to the two people closest to him. Small and shivering. Children. His children now, as they were offered to him.

He floated down and curled his wings around them for protection. They were covered in blood, but seemed uninjured. He cleaned their faces gently and purred for them, attempting to ease the fear. Eventually, it worked, the smaller one falling asleep from exhaustion in the bigger one’s arms.

One of the big ones, the ones that smelled of anticipation with a hint of impatience, made some noises and Dipper looked up at it.

It said a lot of words and moved its arms around for a bit. The words meant little to Dipper now, but his mind automatically translated them to base intentions.

It wanted something. All the big people did. It wanted him to do something for them, and they were going to hurt the children for it. They were going to hurt his children.

Dipper arched his back and hissed at the person. The world snapped into crystal clear focus as his pupils contracted. His wings flared out wide behind him and black passed over his skin in chunks. The anticipation gave way to panic almost immediately, but the person could not run before he leapt.

Landing on its chest, Dipper’s claws were inch-long and sharp enough to cut through skin and sinew like butter. He grabbed hold of its ribs and sunk his teeth into its throat, ripping it out in one fluid motion. His mouth filled with the sweet taste of blood and death, and his ears filled with the screams of the other big ones as they scattered through three different doors out of the room. Sprinting for their lives. Oh, fun!

He caught up to the first one in two jumps, driving his claws into its back and snapping its neck between his jaws. He used its falling body as a springboard and hit the third one before the second hit the ground.

He had a bit more fun with the third one. His wings held down its arms and he sat on its legs to pin them down as he clawed open its stomach and started ripping out the things inside with his teeth. Once it tasted dead and the terror in the air faded away, he sat up and listened for the others.

He could sense the masses of earth around him and knew that he was far underground. This meant that unless the prey went upwards, it would be trapped down there for easy pickings. Of the five sets of terrified footsteps he could make out, only one seemed to be moving in that direction. He headed towards it.

His fourth target had just made it to the next floor and was breathing too hard to hear him race across the ceiling towards it. Only when he was right above it did it look up to see him, at which point he grabbed hold of its head and ate its eyes, before crushing its skull between his hands. Again, he stopped to listen.

His senses were so much better when he focused like this. He only had to extend his awareness a little bit for the whole building to unfurl in his mind. He knew the exact positions of every room, hallway and door he could want, and he could easily pinpoint his children and his prey on that mental map. At the moment, two of the runners were heading for a large two-story room, and if he went through the door on his left, he would get there first.

Waiting in the rafters above them, Dipper watched the two persons enter the room and run for a door on the other side. With a small twist of reality, he made sure it would be locked, and then he watched as they circled the room in search for an unlocked door. When they came around to the door they had entered through and found that one locked as well, their panic rose again. They shook handles and tackled doors until they settled for holding on to each other in the middle of the room.

Dipper breathed in their panic with a shudder of delight, and blood dripped from his wings to the floor. They saw the blood, looked up and screamed as he fell onto them.

When he was finished with them, one’s head pulled through the other person’s torso, he could only hear one set of footsteps. Listening harder, he found that one of his remaining targets had sat down crying in a corner. Oh well. He snuck out one of the now-unlocked doors and searched out the one that was still walking.

He let it see him at the end of the hallway it was walking through. It turned on its heel to run, and he followed sedately. For the next several minutes, he kept himself in the prey’s sight, or let it hear him, keeping it running at full sprint without ever getting closer. He kept it trapped by concealing the door to the stairs when it passed by, and it ran in circles, leaking terror and exhaustion. At the five-minute mark, it stumbled and fell, too tired to get up, and he pulled its limbs off, one by one.

Then he heard a sound. Ah, the last one had found the elevator and gone inside, trapping itself in a tiny room. Perfect!

He raced up through the big room and through the second floor just in time to rip open the elevator doors and get on top of the car. He heard its breath hitch from inside and grinned widely as he opened the ceiling hatch. With this one, he tried to have its screams last for as long as possible. The elevator had long since reached the ground floor by the time it stopped.

\---

Coming back to his children, he saw that the bigger one had fallen asleep as well, still holding onto the smaller one. They were both shivering. This place was far too dark and cold for them. Time to go home.

\---

When Dipper woke up several hours later, it was to find that he was covered head to toe in blood and small pieces of worse things. He had probably completely ruined the living room carpet, which he was lying on, and he was holding protectively onto two almost as blood-covered children, one girl at around eight and a boy no older than four. He also had no clue who the children were or where the blood came from, and the last few hours were more of a blur than they usually were when he got badly stoned.

He really, really hated those herbs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, and hey, [art. ](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/131631702561/hey-you-guys-remember-my-delightfully-bloody)


	3. Twin Starlets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. I wrote an AU for the AU. I called it Twin Starlets because twin stars is a term this AU already uses a lot. I suppose this is an attempt at writing an auception that is not twice as sad as our actual canon. Tell me if I made it.

The fight happens as it always does, over hundreds of thousands of dimensions. The demon plans to break the world, they plan to stop him, and the result ends up somewhere in the middle, but this time, in the end, they burn together.

When it is all over, they find themselves floating unseen through the town. None of their friends can see them or hear them. They just pass through anything they try to touch. A single look at the Stans’ heartbroken faces is all they need to guess.

“Mabel, I- I think we’re ghosts.”

For a moment, she looks as lost as he feels, but then she smiles. Her smile is not as bright as it usually is, but it is just as optimistic.

“Hey, at least we’re ghosts together.”

He smiles sadly back, and grabs on to her to feel something real in the void. They might have lost everything, but they still have each other, and that always came first.

\---

They are exploring the forests together, in an attempt to put their minds off their death the day before, when Mabel sneezes and her hands catch fire. They both stare at it for a while before she looks up and voices the suspicions they both have growing.

“Bro-bro, I don’t think we’re really ghosts.”

They talk it through. Mabel has never wanted to sit down for her brother’s long-winded theories before, but she recognizes that this is important and should be figured out as soon as possible, so they talk it through. It takes them an hour, but then they have worked out everything they know about what happened, and how Bill’s power was transferred to them.

They calm each other down. Yes, they are demons now. They are no longer part of the real world, and everyone they love thinks they are dead, but they are still together, they will always be together, so it really could have been worse.

\---

It is only a few hours later that Mabel rips off her sweater and throws it away.

“Aaaahrg! I can’t stand it anymore! This is wrong, wrong, wrong!”

Dipper grabs her and begs her to tell him what is wrong.

“It’s the sweaters! They’re all wrong. I mean, I’ve always worn sweaters, I love them, but… they’re comfort clothes, Dipper! Everything I wear is comfort clothes, and I want- I want something more… elegant!”

At the last word, she gestures sharply at her clothes, and suddenly she is wearing a multi-layered yellow dress instead of a simple singlet and a skirt. She looks at it in surprise for a second before rushing off to find a mirror.

She stares at her reflection in horror. Stares at the bright yellow of her dress and hairband, at the black linings and ribbons and pearls, at the black choker with a bow, and the matching bow in her hair, and at the heeled black shoes, so different from what she always used to wear.

“I look like Bill,” she whispers, and Dipper can see the resemblance. More importantly, though, he can see his sister in tears, scared silly of a part of her own mind she cannot acknowledge. If it was him who had suddenly found himself adopting the style of that damned triangle, he assumes he would be just as horrified, but she changed first, she is the one who is scared, and he refuses to let his own mind get in the way of helping her, so he snaps his fingers and changes his old vest and shorts into a tailcoat.

“No you don’t,” he says, and her eyes widen in surprise at his new wardrobe. “You look like my sister, and we look like we’re going to a fancy party. Want to find one?”

She giggles in response.

They find a fancy party, and though no one else can see them, they dance between the guests and know that they are by far the best dressed of all of them.

\---

Their physical changes happen nearly simultaneously. Three days after the transcendence, people have already started calling it that and they can see that it will stick, they look at each other and meet inverted eyes, gold on black. They very nearly freak out completely, but somewhere in the middle of trying to react, they grab on to each other and wordlessly agree to treat it as a joke, as no big deal.

They play with closing their eyes for a minute at a time, and the other watching as their new pupils adjust to the light. They play-fight over who can look the most intimidating, and neither win, because Mabel cannot keep a straight face, while Dipper has a long way to go before he can scare anyone. Mabel thinks so, anyway. The creatures around who can see them seem to disagree.

She adjusts the color of her dress slightly to match her new eyes, and he does the same to his cufflinks. They do not worry. It is still themselves behind their new eyes. Mabel knows she is herself because she can see that her brother is still himself, and he is still himself because he can see the same for her.

They do the same for the teeth and claws, when they show up. They play at scaring each other, growling and hissing in between the giggles. It takes the edge off it. If either of them had been alone, it would have been terrifying, but they have each other, and they can deal with anything together.

Then the wings come in, and though he gets his first, she laughs hard enough to sprout her own only a minute later. They would have crashed into so many walls that day, if they were tangible, trying to get their wings under control.

\---

Their mindscapes are melded slightly. There is no clear line between his rolling fields and her maze of thorns. (They never quite understand why she has the maze while he has the open field. They keep thinking it should have been the other way around, but at least they both feel welcome in each other’s scapes.) The nightmares answer to them both, passing from one to the other, and changing from oily sheep to rainbow pigs without a thought. Some of them favor one or the other, though, and that is okay.

The meld lets them hear each other if they think hard enough, lets them get an inkling of the other’s state of mind. They are still not actual telepathic twins, but they influence each other, and it takes little to no power to play tricks like speaking in synch or finishing each other’s sentences.

\---

They are summoned for the first time only a week after the Transcendence. By Bill’s circle, of all things. The summon turns out alright, they want money in return for half a year off each of their lives, and the twins realize they can do that. It is less of a shock than it should be, but it is still an interesting realization.

When they come back, they sit down and draw out their respective summoning circles, just to compare them. They are different enough to notice immediately, but similar enough that either could be used to summon either or both of the twins. Bill’s circle is almost a perfect middle ground, and they decide not to correct people, and just adopt it as their own. Might as well do this together as well, right?

Dipper comes up with the names Alcor and Mizar for their business personas, and Mabel has to agree that it is better than anything she could come up with.

They do show up separately sometimes, to give each other a break, or to be two places at once, but scholars over the centuries still argue over whether Alcor and Mizar are truly two demons, or just one with a personality disorder. The twins read the theories and laugh, then show up to test-summonings morphed into each other, or into hybrids of each other, or slowly changing into each other over the course of the summoning, and one memorable time as a full flock of differently morphed clones.

\---

Dipper is the first one of them to get an info dump. Watching her brother be pulled out of his own mind, leaving her truly alone for the first time in ten days, gives her her first uncontrolled freak out. That, combined with Dipper’s overloaded mind so close to her own, pulls her into an info dump as well. Waking up hours later, they grab onto each other as if their lives depend on it and shudder and cry. It is their first taste of the horrible truth of what omniscience looks like crammed into a mind that is still shaped like a human’s. It will not be the last. They quickly learn that being close to each other when one of them is lost to the universe inevitably brings the other down as well.

It is the only thing they never learn to help each other with, the only thing that being two only makes worse. They hate it with a passion.

\---

They are two months into life as twin demons the first time they kill someone.

Summonings are commonplace now. Every few days or so, they feel the pull of a sacrifice and the call of a name or two, and are pulled through space to appear wherever their summoner is. Sometimes they play tricks, twist words, but usually they try to be fair. They might be demons now, but that is no reason to act like jerks.

This summoning starts no differently. The pull is stronger than normal and tastes like blood, but they think nothing of it. Most likely, someone killed a goat again.

But they arrive in the circle just in time to see a tiny human body go still with a knife through its heart, to feel the power of eight decades of unlived years fill their bodies, and the world stops.

They grab hold of each other’s hands, horror flowing between their minds, and she begins to shout. She accuses and demands for explanations. How dare they? How dare they kill a child? Who do they think they are? And her shouts devolve into static while her dress becomes covered in a brick pattern, as does her skin. Her pupils grow until her entire eyes are glowing, and Dipper would worry for her, he really would, but his eyes are fixed on the unmoving child, not even a toddler yet, and his head is filled with the same kind of static as her voice, and he knows his skin is as black as hers.

They can no longer pretend their teeth and claws are playthings. They no longer want to. Flesh tears between their fingers, souls are torn out of chests and chewed to pieces. When they are finished, there are only pieces left that are recognizably human.

Mabel watches her brother curl in on himself and stare at his blood-covered hands in horror. She understands, of course. There is blood on her hands too, the taste of it in her mouth. What happened here was undeniably demonic, and any good human being would regret it, but her brother is close to tears from self-loathing, and there is a dead child at the table, and she makes a decision.

“It’s alright, bro-bro,” she says, shielding her mind slightly to hide her lies, “we couldn’t let them get away with that. We had to let them know just how _not okay_ that was, so it wasn’t our fault, right?”

That is not why they did it, and they both know it. That is not why they enjoyed it so much, but he accepts her words with a shaky smile.

They spend the next week just playing with each other, doing voiceover of random people in the street or playing minigolf all over the mindscape, she is back in sweaters, and he conjures one up for himself as well. They use the power they got from the eaten souls to ignore every other summon until they feel better. They also figure out a few more things about how their power works, like how they are apparently drawing on the same pool. One of them eating a soul boosts the other as well.

\---

It has been nearly a year since the incident which stole away both of his great-niblings, and Stanford Pines hears rumors. He hears rumors about Bill’s circle still being in use, and about what appears if you use it. He might be many things, but no one can claim that he is stupid, and he pieces it together far enough to realize the children might still be alive.

He explains all this to Stanley in a single breath, before he realizes that both his brother’s employees are in the room. The damage is done then. They all want to try a demonic summoning.

Ford tries to explain how dangerous that is, but Stan brushes him off. He knows all that, but he has always been willing to risk the destruction of the universe itself for his family. Ford is much easier to convince than anyone thought he would be, least of all himself, but the world has seemed so empty without the kids in it, and there is apparently little he would not do for family either, when it comes down to it.

There is a second or two after they finish the chant where the four summoners simply stare at the creatures in front of them. These demons who looks so much like their little friends, their lost children, yet so different, but then Mabel cries out, “Grunkle Stan!” and throws herself around his waist, and Dipper sinks to his knees, sprawling like a child, with a whisper of “we’re home” filled with pure wonder, and they know it is them. They look like the demons they are, however that is possible, but it is them.

Stan sits down and holds around them both, and they embrace him back as if he were their lifeline, with both normal limbs and new ones. The rest sit down around them, keeping as close as they can, and no one is keeping count of which ones of them cry.

Only five minutes later does Dipper raise his head and whisper somewhat shamefully, “We can’t really stay any longer without a deal."

“How come?” Soos asks, and Mabel makes a sound somewhat like a snort.

“Takes a whole bunch of power just to stay on the physical plane, dude. Especially since we kinda left the circle.”

“It doesn’t have to be a lot,” Dipper continues, “as long as it’s something.”

“So, not like our souls or anything?” Wendy asks, and the twins laugh, the huddle dissolving a little as they stand up.

“Man,” Mabel says, “now that would be an unfair deal if I ever saw one.”

In the end, they are promised anything from the vending machine if they stay, and they sit down with their snacks in the kitchen and try to explain how they have spent the last year. Over the course of the conversation, they realize how much they have lost touch with their humanity. They say things, or do things, without noticing the inherent creepiness if it. They have noticed this before, of course, but they have been trying to keep each other in check. They are slipping at the same rate now, and they really need to speak with humans more, if only to calibrate.

In the end, Ford is the one who asks if their parents should be informed. The twins look to each other and answer “no” in union.

“It’s not like we want them to think we’re dead,” Dipper clarifies, “but it’s just-“

“They already think we are. I mean, we’ve visited sometimes, while invisible-“

“And they’re heartbroken, sure, and they think they’d do anything to get us back, but-“

“They’re not really handling the Transcendence-thing well at all.”

“At all.”

“And they probably wouldn’t think it was us, if they saw us,”

“and even if they did, they wouldn’t feel it was us.”

“We’re not really those people anymore. Not completely.”

There is a full five seconds of silence before Stan exclaims, “Eh, darn all that. You’ll always be home here anyways.”

They are.

Not like before, of course. Not all the time. They are much too used to going wherever they want whenever they want for that, but home is a physical place now, with people they love in it, and not just their lot of the mindscape. It makes a difference. They have somewhere to go, people to speak with, and Stan’s eventual lessons in fraud and conmanship come very much in handy.

They are summoned for family things now, and by friends. Their individual circles are finally put to use, so that Mabel can be called for a girl’s night out without her brother showing up as well, and Dipper can be called for a game of D,D&moreD without Mabel having to worry about graph paper. They often come along anyway. They tend to get nervous if they spend too long apart, these days.

\---

Their biggest difference might be their genders, but not in the way you might think.

When Dipper transcended, he had only barely started puberty. As a demon, many of the things that usually become important for mature humans never happened for him, but girls mature faster. Mabel still reacts to the idea of physical love the same way her brother does, with mild disgust while in a more human state of mind, and indifference or the entirely wrong kind of fascination while more demonic, but she gets crushes.

They think nothing of it at first. Mabel finds boys they pass on the street cute, nothing has changed there, but her crushes have always had a degree of creepy obsession in them, and now she is far more dangerous. She loves like a flash fire, quickly and destructively.

The first boy she really latches onto happens before they have much power to affect the physical world. It is a good thing they figure it out that early.

She follows him everywhere, trying to find out as much as possible about him. She watches his dreams, goes through his drawers and growls under her breath whenever he gets close to a girl. Dipper tries to stay away as much as he can bear. He has never wanted to get involved in his sister’s crushes, but he watches as her possessiveness grows to worrying levels, and then he notices it leaks over to him. Whatever she owns, he owns, and now he is feeling dangerously possessive of a guy his sister fancies on a whim.

It takes a month for Mabel’s crush to fade, and another week before their demonic instincts let them leave him alone, and by then most of the boy’s friends are avoiding him because of the terrifying presence that always hangs around him, and he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

They leave that situation shaken, and Mabel swears not to go that overboard about a crush again. It takes her a month to break that promise.

A few years later, she has almost gotten a grip on it, but she wants something more. She wants some kind of relationship, and Dipper cannot find it in his heart to argue. She falls for a guy she sees on a street in Paris, and they figure they might as well give it a shot.

The next time they have leftover energy from a summon, she shifts as human as she can, with her wings hidden beneath her dress and sunglasses over her eyes, and approaches him. After a few false starts where she almost forgets how to human, they get along well.

They go out on a few dates. His friends think she is just a little too clingy, but she wins him over easily enough, then wins them over too. Being a demon has done little to her charisma. She tells him she has a strange eye condition and starts going without the glasses. He deals with it perfectly well. She is happy, and in love.

Then, one night, they sit at a bench in a park. It is late and they are alone, and a magical storm passes by. She wakes up minutes later with blood on her hands, and the only reason her boyfriend is still alive is that Dipper kept enough of his mind through this storm to stop her. The boy never wants to see her again, and she accepts that as reasonable.

She tries again, a few more times over the years, but it never ends any better. That is, until Wendy’s cousin Henry moves to Gravity Falls the year they are 21.

Mabel falls, and she falls hard. Having been burned before, and bad, she tries to stay away from the new object of her affections. He ends up as a part of their lives despite her trying to stay out of his, and it turns out that even though he finds the whole ‘being a demon’ thing disturbing, he likes her a lot too. They end up together, and after half a year of waiting for the other shoe to drop, they realize they are going to stay together.

There are moments where one or the other of the twins lose their mind around him, but the other one is always ready to come to the rescue, and eventually, he feels safe around them.

The biggest challenge of their relationship comes the day Mabel brushes her fingers over the cigarette burns on his cheek, and her omniscience tells her where they come from. His parents end up in the hospital, and she is not sure whether or not to apologize, and how. He forgives her soon enough, though, because he knows why she did it, and because they are still alive when he knows she wanted to kill them.

The triplets are adopted. Mabel wants children, but cannot have them herself, and someone somewhere did not want children and ended up with three. Dipper is more of a dad number two than an uncle, because the children are hers, and everything that is hers, is his.

The kids stay safe. Safer than anyone could be, because they have not one, but two demons looking after them, and their mother is more vicious than her twin is.

They watch their loved ones die together, and move on with difficulty. Mabel gets more crushes after a while. Sometimes she crushes on the same soul many times over the centuries, millennia. Sometimes they are the only contact the twins have with the human world.

\---

Alcor and Mizar being literal twins is a well known fact. They say it often enough and they look similar enough that no one thinks to doubt them.

Romance novels starring the two of them still exist, but they never become popular. There are a few involving Sarva, though. The name given to the lucky, or unlucky, soul they give their affections.

\---

Their memories leak slightly over the meld. Not enough to be immediately noticeable, but enough to see over time.

He takes up the violin, she sticks to her art. They cling to these things, to their differences, to prove to themselves that they are individuals. After a while, the scholars wondering if they are one or two demons stop being funny. They try to stay apart, try to show up to summonings separately, try to make friends independently of each other, but it never lasts.

One day long after the death of our planet they suddenly realize they no longer remember which one was which.

\---

They restart the universe, and for the first hundred thousand years, they are reborn in one body.

Their reincarnations become more and more unstable, having personality disorders of all kinds. They are two souls in one body for the longest time, then they are conjoined twins, more and more frequently.

Over the next several hundred thousand years, they are identical twins more often than not, then fraternal twins, and then non-twin siblings, or cousins, always closer to each other than to anyone else.

The very first time they are not biological family, they become lovers. Not because there is anything very romantic about their relationship, but because it feels right to be close to each other in every possible way. They feel safe with each other. They feel to the bottom of their souls that no matter if the entire world ends, as long as they are together, it will be alright.


	4. A day for demon sheep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written from [this](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/130406585341/if-you-feel-like-writing-it-the-flock-babysitting) prompt. Hope you're happy, anon!

Terrence, Destroyer of Grass, Eater of Souls, Esquire, had a hard time categorizing his day. Usually, his days fell into the simple categories of good day, neutral day or bad day, but not this one.

A bad day was when he got himself trapped in a dreamcatcher, or the Flock was attacked and one of his flockmates was hurt, or if he disappointed the Master somehow. A bad day was when something bad happened, and he felt bad.

A neutral day was one where nothing especially good or bad happened.

A good day was a day spent with his Flock, a day spent influencing dreamers, or a day when he did something that made the Master happy. A day spent in the physical world, eating real grass, was definitely a good day, and a day when the Master showed an extra amount of trust in them was always a good day. By all counts, this should have been a good day, so why was he so worried?

He chewed on his grass thoughtfully. Real grass really was a special treat, and he was happy about that, at least. It was the responsibility it came with this time that bothered him.

This time, the Flock had been drafted into babysitting duty.

They had watched over things before, of course. Star, the Survivor had already stayed with them for nearly a year, and she was hard enough to keep safe, but this was no mere dream.

This time, the Master had left them alone with three tiny human children.

They were small, fragile, much more demanding than a dream lamb and infinitely more precious. Terrence (etc.) carried no doubts at all that if something happened to them on the Flock’s watch, they would regret it dearly. Luckily, it was only supposed to be for a few hours.

It was a very nice day, so they were all outside in the yard, but the door to the shack was open in case anyone needed anything from inside. The kids sat on a blanket in between all the sheep. The boy was pulling at the wool of a nightmare, seemingly content, and the girl who smelled like fire looked on quietly, but the other girl seemed bored.

She looked around with a determined face, and Terrence was suddenly reminded of how Star would look, seconds before bolting off to almost get herself killed. Again. The little sheep, not a lamb anymore, but still tiny, was always too curious for her own good. Too unafraid. She would evade the eyes of her guardians without thought, only to stand at the very edge of the pasture, staring at the void. She was reckless in her fascination, and this little human girl gave Terrence the same feeling.

Just as he had thought it, the little girl crawled off the blanket in the direction of the forest. She was not very fast, and Sauron managed to catch her shirt between his teeth and carry her back before she got very far, but she was determined, and immediately crawled off again.

All ten nightmares present watched with their metaphorical hearts in their throats as Sauron and Waddles II tried their best to wrestle the child down while not harming a hair on her head, and not letting her harm herself. By the time they managed it, mostly by pinning her to the ground and tickling her, they realized the other girl was gone.

The two child-wrestlers and the one whose wool was still being explored by the boy were left to stay by the blanket, and the rest of the sheep spread out in search of the missing child. Terrence turned a corner of the human residence just in time to see the girl wander away between the trees. Further in, he glimpsed the silhouette of something large and threatening.

He was over her in a second, no longer so worried about small scrapes. He displayed all his weapons and growled at the bearlike predator in front of him, but it did not seem deterred. Between his legs, the Master’s little girl whimpered. He had to keep her safe, he had to get her back okay, but he was just one nightmare, and the thing in front of him was far too big.

It took a step closer and opened jaws full of mandibles, and suddenly it had Killer clamped around its neck. The vicious little nightmare bit down, and the creature howled. Several more of his flockmates showed up around them, and he picked up the little girl and ran in the other direction. The Flock could handle the predator. The important thing was to keep the girl safe.

Back with her siblings, the girl started crying, and the other two followed suit. After making sure the three of them would stay put on the blanket this time, Terrence did the only thing he could do, and popped back into the mindscape.

The gray expanse of his home pastures was a welcome break from the stress of the waking world. Most of the Flock had been left there, patrolling the perimeter. Terrence passed between his brethren in search of a single sheep.

Star was easy enough to find, white against black as she was, and eager to help. The hard part was convincing the rest of the Flock to let her leave the mindscape without the Master present. Terrence had to admit he disliked the idea himself, so much could go wrong, but they were out of options. There were still several hours left until the Master or the parents of the children came back, and they were the Master’s precious ones, after all, they had to take precedence.

In the end, he and Star came back to the waking world together, and she calmed the crying children and put them to sleep in a matter of seconds. Hopefully, nothing else would go wrong before they were done.

Of course, the kids woke up after only an hour and were hungry. Lacking hands completely, that was almost a harder thing to fix for the sheep than fighting the bear-thing had been.

The Master came back in the end, though, and the children were both safe and content. The sheep were exhausted, some of them were actually injured, and Terrence was still shaking slightly from the scare, but the Master patted his head and told them ‘good work’, and that he was proud of them, so all in all? It was a good day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Star and Acacia do of course have so much in common because Star was Acacia's dream from back before she was born. Funfact!


	5. Children in the Woods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is from an anonymous prompt about my take on the Woodsman. Man, do I love the Woodsman. Here are some of my thoughts on him.

Henry Pines stood in the forest and breathed.

It was not something he did very often, because even three years after the incident where his entire being shifted into something more than human, the edges of his abilities still tended to scare him a little. The changes ranged from the subtle to the drastic, and some of the less noticeable ones were the ones that still bothered him.

The antlers, he got used to. He knew they were there even when they were ethereal. He could feel the cold weight of the limbs hanging from them, not as dead as they should be. The fire he could sense centered somewhere close to his heart became a strange kind of comfort after a while, as did the phantom sense of the handle of his axe under his fingers, the knowledge that he would always be ready and capable of protecting himself and his loved ones. The new senses were harder to deal with. At times, he felt less contained by his own body than he should be.

Standing and breathing with his eyes closed, he felt his connection to the earth spread out around him. He knew the slight pressure around his legs was the flora twining around them, almost becoming part of him. When he concentrated, he could sense them as well as he could sense his own hands. The trees stood out like faint beacons around him, glowing dully with energy. Among them, the brighter points of life that were animals and forest creatures scuttled around, giving him no heed. He knew he stood stiller than any human should, only breathing slightly.

He spread his awareness out further, and hit the edge of town. The people there stood out like bonfires, drawing his attention like a moth to a flame. He automatically registered the positions of the people he knew the best. There was his wife, knitting on the porch. There was his eldest daughter, climbing a tree at the edge of the forest. He forcibly pulled his attention away. He knew where they were. They were not what he was looking for this time.

Once more, he extended his senses. A small, scared part of his brain told him he had to stop, that he would become completely unmoored from his own body. He twitched slightly, and felt his skin crack where it had almost solidified into a thin layer of bark, and he heard something snap, and realized a thin vine had reached up and curled around his wrist. He ignored it. He knew what he was doing.

Three more inhales and exhales, and he found what he was looking for. Far deeper into the forest than it should be, the small, glowing form of a child lay curled up. The little boy had gotten himself lost hours ago, and Henry had overheard his parents’ pleas for help, and decided to give finding him a shot. Focusing on the small shape, he noticed the much larger form of something far more dangerous approaching.

His eyes shot open, and in a fraction of a second, he was running, ripping up the flora surrounding him effortlessly.

He knew where he was going, instinctively knew the fastest way to get there, knew the terrain like he knew the back of his hand. Nonetheless, it would take even the best of sprinters ten minutes to get to where the kid was, and in five, it would be too late. Henry knew he would get there in time.

He felt his legs lengthen as he ran, felt the now oh-so-familiar sensation of his flesh twisting in ways it was never meant to twist. He could feel the flow of energy in the ground turn as he drew it in towards himself, could feel the boost it gave him. He felt the antlers branching off his head twist into existence and knew he no longer looked human, but he was too focused, too single minded to care.

Once he found the kid, he reached out and hooked his axe around a tree, he had pulled it from its spot on the porch the second he needed it, and jolted to a halt. He stepped in front of the kid just in time to stand face to face with a feathered, reptilian creature that loomed over even him.

The creature bared its teeth. He raised his axe. The scene was illuminated by blue fire.

The creature hesitated, growled a little, then took a step back and regarded him. He took a step after it and made himself stand taller. His vision was clouded, but his sense of the underlying energy was keen enough to make up for it. He saw his opponent’s hesitation as a physical thing, saw it stop to weigh the worth of the prey against the danger of the monster it faced. He took another step forward and raised his axe to swing, and it turned tail and ran. For a moment, he contemplated going after it, but no. His job was done.

The sensation of pain reached his mind as he stood down. His skin resealed itself as the tendrils of the axe handle retracted, and he dropped it to be taken by the forest. The spiked roots weaving through his skin pulled back similarly, and his limbs shortened back to human proportions. Once his vision returned to normal and he knew his eyes looked less freaky, he turned to face the kid.

“Hey, are you okay?”

The little boy was curled up at the base of the tree, but at the words, he raised his head and nodded shyly. Henry crouched down and smiled, arms halfway reached out towards him.

“You want to go home?”

The kid hesitated for a second, then threw himself forward and slung his arms around Henry’s neck. He made a small “mhm” sound and Henry had to chuckle a little. He put his arms around the kid and stood up.

“Let’s go home, then.”

He only took two steps before the kid finally spoke.

“Um… mister tree man?”

“Yeah?”

“Um…” The kid fidgeted, looking back into the shadowy forest rather than up at Henry. “Can you keep the axe? Just-in-case?”

Henry smiled fondly at him. At least the poor kid would not run off into the forest on his own anymore.

“Sure I can. Look,” he said, and pulled the axe out of the closest tree. He showed it to the kid, then hung it at his belt. “No one’s going to hurt you while you’re with me.”

The kid smiled then, reassured, and put his head back down on Henry’s chest, and they walked through the forest together. The walk back to the library, where the parents were waiting, should take just over twenty minutes. During the walk, Henry distracted the boy by pointing out animals that would not have gotten as close had he been anyone else. At one point, a bird actually landed on his head, and the boy laughed, all thoughts of danger forgotten.

Acacia spotted them at the tree line, and the boy’s mother was already running towards them as they exited the forest. The boy squirmed in his arms, and he put him down to run and hug his mother.

“Mama!” he shouted, in that excited way children his age do. “Mama, I was attacked by a dinosaur! But it was okay because the tree man scared it away and then we saw a deer and a rabbit with horns and there was a bird on his head and…”

Henry phased out what was being said, and smiled at Mabel across the front yard. She stood beside the boy’s father, who was on his knees from relief. Acacia rappelled down the tree with the grappling hook until she hung just above face to face with him.

“Tree man?” she asked, and he raised an eyebrow to match hers.

“Well, there _was_ a dinosaur.”

She laughed at that. Then she got stuck and he had to help her unhook the grappling hook.

Later, after many profuse thank yous from the parents, The Pines’ went inside, and Acacia hung up the grappling hook, and Henry put down his axe in the umbrella stand, beside Mabel’s bloody bat. Then they sat down to eat with the rest of the family.

Yes, things were good.

\---

Hundreds of years later, the forests of Gravity Falls were unique for more than one reason. Anywhere else, one had to be a certain age to be allowed to wander the forests on one’s own, but in Gravity Falls, children of all ages often ran around unsupervised. Because, if they ever got lost, or got hurt, they would always be found back at their parents’ doorstep the same night, sometimes eating on the best apples in the world, and always with stories of the nice tree man who helped them get home.


	6. A day for demons

Sometimes, Dipper lost his mind. It could be triggered by many things, like bad info dumps, or magical storms, though he was slowly getting the hang of blocking the latter. Sometimes, when he lost his mind, people got hurt, but usually he only scared them a lot. Even Mabel got scared at times, even though she hid it very well. There was no way around it.

When Dipper lost his mind, he also lost his humanity. What was left was pure demonic presence, and it scared people. No matter how used to him someone was, or how well they knew that he would never hurt them, anyone would feel afraid at the fully unleashed presence of such a powerful demon. Well, almost anyone.

Sometimes, Dipper babysat the triplets. It was practical. He could touch them without needing to make a deal, and he was good with them, had endless patience for these stars of his life. Sometimes, Mabel and Henry needed some time on their own. Sometimes, Stan was out on “business” and Ford was never home anyways, the world was too interesting. Sometimes, no friends were available to take care of it, and Dipper assured them that he could handle the kids on his own for a few hours. No problem. Sure.

Usually, it went well. Sometimes, problems arose.

This day started off around midnight with a slight buzz in the back of his head. It felt a little like he had an insect trapped in there, but the sensation stayed faint, and he tried to ignore it. By the time he was left alone in the house with the kids, he had almost forgotten it was there. Then it started to grow.

Ignoring it as he was, he only noticed it had gotten worse when, one hour into the task, he subconsciously pressed a hand against his head in an attempt to quiet it down. He stopped what he was doing, skewed his eyes shut and pressed both hands against his temples, because he could feel it now, could feel how bad it had gotten. It sounded like an angry hornet, trying to drown out his thoughts, and it was getting angrier. He tried to fight it back for several minutes before another sensation drew his attention.

A demon. Someone other than himself. A reasonably strong one, even. One that had almost entered _his territory_.

He stopped fighting, and in a second, the buzzing overtook his mind, leaving nothing but vibrating instincts. The other demon skirted the borders of town, and Dipper moved. An instant later, he was floating far above everything. The other moved closer out of curiosity, crossing the border, and Dipper _growled_. It was just as much emotion as sound. A wave of fear, reflected and amplified by every mortal it passed, as a warning to the other. The townspeople were not as scared as they could have been, of course. This was Gravity Falls. It was _his_. It was his home, his territory, his people. They knew that he had no reason to hurt them before anyone else, so they were only half as scared as any other group would be when faced with his growl, but the air still gained a thick, sweet taste of fear, and the other demon hesitated.

Dipper growled again, and below him, someone took cover, shivering. He breathed in the fear-tainted air and smiled sharply, showing off all his shark-like teeth. The other demon seemed to contemplate its next move for a few seconds before deciding that the strange little town was not worth it. Dipper sneered after it as it left, then moved back down to the small human lodging he called his home.

\---

The room carried a distinct lack of fear, he noticed. There were the three tiny humans in a cot, and they knew he was there. They should by all counts be terrified by his mere presence so close to them, yet they seemed oblivious. It annoyed him, just a little.

He picked one of them up between his claws and it smiled at him. He smiled back, all sharp edges and predatory points, because the little thing was his. Completely and absolutely his. Not in the same way Mabel was, maybe, but his nonetheless. He had touched it and its siblings in the womb, imprinted them with his aura, and they would always, always let him get close now.

He squished it slightly between his fingers. Not enough to hurt it, but enough to feel it move. It was so fragile. So tiny and fragile and mortal, though it shone so brightly to his eyes. It would be so easy to rip it apart, to tear it to pieces and make it know fear. It was a speck in comparison to him, hardly even a throwaway snack, a useless little thing, but it was his. His to do with as he wanted.

He brushed his claws lightly over its skin, never once hard enough to break it. He could feel every muscle and tendon move beneath it. Then he brought it up and licked it, only a few times, just to see what it tasted like, and because it felt right. It tasted like what human skin usually tastes like. Salty, with a promise of the deliciousness hidden within. He licked it again just to make sure, and it poked him in the face. It laughed, and raised its little hand to poke at his face, at his cheeks and nose and lips and eyes. At one point, it started poking at his teeth, and he took its entire hand into his mouth and nibbled its fingers. He was careful not to bite too hard. It was so very fragile, after all.

Its sibling started crying, and he read its mind in a second to see that it was hungry. Pulling food for them out from where it was in the kitchen was trivial for him, and he lifted all three tiny mortals in his arms as he fed them. Their little hearts were beating so fast, like rabbits’ hearts, and they were only slightly out of synch with each other. He counted every heartbeat, noticed every breath. With a single move, he could crush them, destroy them so thoroughly that nothing of those heartbeats remained, but he held them carefully, cradled in his arms and in his wings. He was not sure why, but it felt right, and as such a powerful creature as he, if he felt something was right, it was right.

Once the children were fed, he put them to bed and sang to them. The words were mostly gibberish made out of a thousand different languages, and the melody was the kind that harmonized directly with the brain. They were sleeping before he finished the first line, but he kept singing, filling the otherwise empty house with haunting melodies and eerie disharmonies. He matched his rhythm to the pace of their breathing, and slowly but surely, the buzzing in his head receded.

\---

Later, he would cringe at exactly how terrible it could have gone.

Even though it did go well this time, he would ask the Flock to take over for a while if it ever happened again.


	7. Lucy Ann makes a visit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dude, Lucy Ann canonically turns like twelve thousand tears old, right? We can put her in practically every reincarnation story. Why don't we do this more often?

Lionel Sterling thought he was prepared for many things, thought he could deal with many things. He could, really. He might not have taken his son being an actual demon completely in stride, but he dealt with it incredibly well. Life still had a way of catching him off guard. Like when he opened the door after a knock to find what looked like a five-year-old girl in a cape. A girl who did not show up in the little mirror installed in the door.

Lionel glanced upwards, and yeah, the sky was clear and the sun was beating down hard enough to transform most vampires to ash. He looked back down at the girl, and she looked completely unperturbed. If anything, she looked to be enjoying the sunlight.

“You Lionel Sterling?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

“Right, I’m looking for your son,” she said, and, oh.

“Of course you are,” he said, and dragged a hand over his face. Bizarre things like this were really happening with alarming frequency lately.

The girl smiled widely, and those really were impressive fangs for one her size, and put her hands up in a placating gesture.

“Hey, I get it,” she said. “You don’t know me. You don’t have to let me in, just tell him I want to talk, yeah?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he said. Really, what was he doing? “I’m being rude. Come in.”

He stepped aside, and she crossed the threshold. She took her cape off and threw it onto a peg with remarkable accuracy.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Oh, Lucy Ann,” she answered. “Well, not really, but it’s what he knows me as, so…”

Lionel nodded, and they walked through the hallway together.

“You know Dipper well, then?”

She snorted.

“Yeah, me and him go way back. It’s good to have someone who won’t go away, you know?” Lionel’s experience with that notion was very limited, but he nodded along either way. She kept talking. “Not that it matters much when they put you on ignore for _thirty fucking years!_ ”

At the last few words, she popped her head around a corner into the living room. In the living room, Dipper and Belle both sat on the couch, doing their own things. Belle looked up curiously, but Dipper’s eyes shot open at the sight, he said, “oh _fuck,_ ” and then he bolted from the room.

“Get your ass back here you little prick!” Lucy Ann shouted, and ran after him. Lionel and his daughter were left to stare in befuddlement as the two immortals ran on a merry chase through the house. And also to listen to them shouting at each other.

“I’m sorry!” Dipper’s voice called out.

“Thirty years, asshole!”

“I forgot!”

“You just forgot, did you!”

Instead of answering, Dipper let out a high-pitched scream, which dissolved into childish laughter at the sound of two people crashing down the stairs.

For a few seconds, the faint sounds of Dipper’s giggling was the only thing to be heard, then Belle yelled, “Are you guys alright?”

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry,” Lucy Ann called back.

“You literally just broke my arm,” Dipper chimed in, and Lionel felt a cold weight drop briefly through his chest.

“Oh come on, you can fix that in a second, and it’s not like it even bothers you.”

“Still. What kind of way is that to greet an old friend?”

“A friend who’s been _ignoring me_ for the last thirty years.”

“I told you it was an accident! I put you on auto-answering machine for a while because you were being annoying about that one movie, and then I forgot to take you off it, and then-“

“And then you disappear from the face of the earth!”

There were footsteps coming back up the stairs now.

“I mean you, you just, ugh. First you put me on ignore for one and a half decades, and I can deal with that. I admit I was a bit annoying about it, and it’s not like we haven’t gone longer without seeing each other before, but then you just leave. Without a word. Look, no one knew where you were, no one knew what had happened to you, and it’s not like no one cared, you know? Kiyo was worried. A little. As was Toby, and you know how he gets when he’s worried. I even stayed around Portland more than I would have otherwise, because I knew they’d get word when you came back.”

Dipper entered the living room, looking no more hurt than before, and Lucy Ann followed after him, stopping in the door.

“I mean, I had to hear you were back from Alice. I’ve never even met Alice! She just remembered we’d want to know! I mean, what were you _thinking?_ ”

“Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same if you had the chance.”

His words sounded very quiet in contrast with her insistence. She opened her mouth to answer them, then closed it again and exhaled with a smile. There was a moment of silence before she spoke again.

“You’re a sappy dork, you know that?”

“It’s good to see you too, Annie,” he answered, and she huffed a laugh.

“Yeah, yeah. You still owe me a smoothie from last time.”

“Oh, yeah.” He snapped his fingers: “I knew there was something. So how’ve you been, anyways?”

She punched him lightly as she passed, they both sat down at the table, and he pulled a smoothie glass out of seemingly thin air for her.

“Oh, you know,” she said, “same old. We’re still trying to rebuild trust after the Travers-fiasco, and I’m not sure if we’ll ever get all the way there, but we’re making some progress. Current boss isn’t all that good. She’s not bad, but she could’ve been way better. Her son’s set to take over in a few years though, and he’s more… Hank-like, I guess. So it’s all good. You?”

Lionel sat down at the table along with Belle and listened to the two of them chat. He realized he had never heard Dipper talking to a friend before. Not like this. Not that he had never had friends, of course, but Dipper was only ever really comfortable around family. He obviously liked and trusted this girl a lot, and yeah, she was an ancient and slightly creepy and violent vampire, but so what?

Lionel also noticed that the smoothie smelled of blood, but he decided not to ask.

The conversation had gone on for about ten minutes when Belle asked, “so how did you guys meet, anyways?” and Lucy Ann turned her big, dark eyes on her.

“Well, I helped his nephew create a mafia once."

“What?”

“Dude.” Lucy Ann looked at Dipper with furrowed brows. “You didn’t tell them about Hank?”

“Huh, I guess I didn’t,” he said, looking contemplative. “I have a lot of stories, okay? I haven’t gotten to that one yet.”

At those words, she grinned a wide, fanged smile, and turned to Belle and Lionel.

“Oh man, you guys are in for a _treat_.”


	8. Twin Starlets-Portland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Twin Starlets AUception! Just a short drabble this time, but it also features Lucy Ann.

For all she was the right hand of an unknowing mafia boss, and her day therefore entailed mediation disputes between pixie troops and harpy crowds, Lucy Ann thought her day this far had been rather calm. At present, she was weaving through the streets, heading for a meeting.

Usually, she could ignore the strange looks she got from worried adults, and the people who tried to stop her to ask where her parents were, but today she was about to be late. She was almost never late for the meetings, and thought it was not really a big problem, Hank still insisted they were mostly dinner with friends and tried to keep them casual, she despised it. Being late for important things was simply not in her nature.

Finally reaching Hank’s doorstep, already ten minutes late, she knocked on the door and waited. She actually considered just walking in, despite the discomfort of doing so uninvited. She would have to ask him to give her an open invitation some day. He opened the door.

“Oh, there you are.”

“Sorry for being late.”

“Don’t be, you’re just in time. Come in.”

She did. Just as she had taken off her outdoor clothes and shoes, a faint pop sounded from the living room, followed by the sounds of screaming and crashing. Hank and Lucy Ann hurried through the door to see what had happened.

Several of the visitors had fallen off their chairs, and a few more had stood up and backed into the table, which had fallen over. All of them wore expressions of terror in various degrees, except Vivi, who stood with a hand over her face. All of them were staring at the figure in the middle of the room.

There, floating right over the middle of the carpet, was a demon.

She looked somewhat like a human woman in her late forties, aside from the pair of black wings growing from her lower back, and the disturbing coloration of her eyes. She wore a bright yellow, long and frilly dress with black details. She had stars in her ears and in her hair, and every person in the room knew her name.

She was Mizar. Mizar the Gleeful, the Merciless. Mizar the Dreamweaver, Burner of Souls, Bringer of Nightmares. Mizar the Twin Star. Seeing her without her twin was extremely rare, but she was simple enough to recognize.

She grinned wide at the sight of Hank, and showed off rows of far too many razor sharp teeth.

“Mom,” he said, “can you please not do this while I have guests?”

There was a stunned silence from most of the room. The thought “what the hell did I sign up for here?” was practically visible on their faces. Vivi snorted out a laugh while Mizar threw herself around her son’s neck and grinned unrepentantly.

Lucy Ann? Lucy Ann looked from the demon, which was cooing and talking exactly like a mother would, to the man who had become her best friend in centuries. She had known he carried the mark of the Twin Stars, of course, it shone far too brightly to ignore. She knew he saw the world from a perspective that at times seemed incomprehensible to her. She knew that, and had known for some time. She really had thought nothing he could do would surprise her anymore.

Mizar, known for burning and destroying anyone she disliked without a trace, asked whether she had come at a bad time.

Hank, the nicest, gentlest, most bewildering person Lucy Ann had met in all her millennia, said, no mom, don’t worry about it, and would she like to stay for dinner?

Lucy Ann gave in to hysterical laughter. Honestly, what the hell.


	9. Willow vs. the future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another small, drabbely thing. From an anon prompt on tumblr.

Willow’s uncle taught her how to see. Or rather, he taught her how to see what she was seeing.

When she was very little, and only barely starting to understand that her world looked different from that of her siblings, he sat her down and showed her the universe. He told her how to understand the things that no one else could see. He taught her what it all was and what it meant, how it worked. She learned things from him that she later understood no other mortal knew.

Among the most important things she learned was how to see people. Those shimmering clouds of color, which tasted like emotions in a way that was not taste at all, was one thing he was the only one who understood. He taught her the names of colors no one else could see, and helped her put words to things no one else could describe. He taught her how to read it and understand it when she wanted, and how to block and filter when necessary. He was her guide to seeing how people looked. Only after she grew older did she think to question why he looked different from everyone else.

Uncle Dipper _was_ different. It was just a fact of life. Where everyone else’s auras hung free and unrestricted around them, his was dulled and controlled. Those few times where he lost his control over it, it was all-encompassing and terrible. His aura did not float around him like a light cloud, it dripped, black and golden and colors she would never have names for, from his form like thick syrup, and seeped into walls and floors and people around him. It tainted everything it touched with its incomprehensible colors, and it was impossible to block out.

For the longest time, Willow thought those terrible colors were the only reason he shielded his aura, keeping it contained to a faint chromatic haze. Then she saw him completely unshielded for the first and only time of her life. It was only for a moment, less than the blink of an eye before he noticed her and shut it down, but it left her collapsed on the ground. He readily dulled her memories of the incident to almost nothing when she asked, so she could later never remember exactly what she saw, but she knew it was not meant for human eyes. It was too great, too terrible. It was too far removed from the present for the concept of time to stay coherent, and she was sure she had felt something click into the wrong track in her brain at the sight of it.

When she calmed down enough to stop crying, she asked him what it was she had seen.

“The only thing that I could never see, even if I tried,” he said. “Myself. My essence. My own power and potential. What I could become, eventually, I suppose. For now, you shouldn’t worry about it.”

Willow accepted that, confident there was no danger, but she did start questioning why his aura looked like it did. Why it was so different from anyone else’s, and why it was even remotely similar when a single glance at what lay beneath very nearly forcibly rearranged her entire worldview.

She was never sure, later, if the experience actually changed anything in her, but it was only after that point she started predicting the future.


	10. Twin Starlets-The Party Crashers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From [this](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/132084850686/weirdmaggedon-spoiler-prompt-okay-i-dont-know) prompt. Transdimensional Twin Starlets fun, with a dash of love. Enjoy.

The party had been on for a day already, but it was still going strong. A whole new universe of party games was waiting to be played, a thousand new flavors of punch, a brand-new castle to romp around in, and if anyone got bored, they could always just sit at a window and laugh at the pitiful humans being terrified by the unholy chaos down below. Really, it had been worth a billion years of party planning.

It was right in the middle of the sixteenth drinking game, plus a friendly death match between 8-ball and Pyronica, that there was a knock on the door. Hectorgon, who had lost badly in the last game of spin the human, went to open it. Outside stood two creatures who looked very much like humans. They were not, of course. Even Hectorgon, who had never been known for his sensory skills, could feel the power coming off them. They were demons, strong demons, maybe stronger even than Bill, but their forms were remarkably human-like.

“We heard there was a party,” they said, in perfect unison.

“Uuuh…” Hectorgon said. He had never seen the two of them before in his life. “Do you have invitations?”

“There was invitations?” they said, again in one voice. Then he turned to her and asked, “Do you have them?”

“Why would I have them?” she said indignantly.

“You’re the one with a purse”

“Oh, come on. You’ve got just as much stuff in your hat as I’ve got in my purse.”

“Well, I don’t have them.”

“Neither do I!”

They turned back to the door and said, “Sorry, we don’t have any.”

It was really kind of creepy how they would move in perfect synch, even when bickering. Really, Hectorgon knew how to be creepy. In fact, he had once won a championship in being creepy just by existing, but he knew when he was in the presence of a master. Or, two masters, as it were. These two knew what they were doing. He suspected the human-like appearance might just be an exercise in advanced uncanny valley.

“Nah,” he said, “I’m just pulling your legs. Come in, kick back, get drunk. We’ve got all the best hallucinogens.”

“You joker, you,” they said and followed him inside.

He expected them to join in on the games or maybe have some punch, but instead they moved to the middle of the room and stopped dead, not moving a hair. They stood there, unmoving, for over half a minute. Then Bill finally noticed them.

“OH LOOK, NEW GUESTS,” he said, and floated down to meet them. “I LIKE YOUR STYLE, WHO ARE YOU?”

The room went silent. Sure, none of them had known who the newcomers were, but Bill… Bill knew everything, right? It had always seemed like he did. He never asked questions like that, always knew every little detail he wanted to know. The newcomers grinned.

“Aw,” the male one said, “he doesn’t remember us.”

“I know,” the other one said, “and I was really ho͡pin̴g̨ he’d get it.”

“Yeah, and after ęvery͞t̴hi̶n͜g we did t͘o͜ ͠each other. Isn’t he s͢up̕po͡s͢e͘d͞ t̵ǫ be a̴ll-knowi͠n͏g,̨ a̢n̷͟y̶w͘ą̡̛yş?”

“Oh, cut͡ ͢h̢i͢m ͡s̛om̷e sl͞a̛ck͝,̡͡b̸̴́r̷̷͡o̶̷t̶͢h̵͢e̵̛͢ŕ̡͏. Ąfte͞r͏ ҉al͘l,͡ wę’͢re ́t̕a̶l̛king ̡abou͢t ͜ś̡ơ͝m̢e̶̕o̷ǹ̸ę͏ ͞w͏̕h̶o͘҉̧ w̧a͜s̕ ̨be̸a͟t͡e͘n̢̢ b͜͠y̸̷ ̧͜a͠ ͏co͡up̴͢͡l̛͟e͝͡͞ ͡of̛ h̨̝͕u͏͍̣͖̟͕m̩͈̩̺̹̞ą͙̫̦̗̯͉n҉͖ ͚̤̝c̤̬̻̗̱̙͓h͈̟̭i̙̪̪̜ld͍͍̫͓͖r̳̼̤̘̰e̮͈̞͕͟n͕̣̺̘.”

“HEY,” Bill said, and his voice might have been shaking just the tiniest bit? The power rolling off the two strangers was insane, and it was followed by hostility. “I’VE NEVER LOST TO ANYONE. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

“Wḩa̧t́ do you͡ t͟hi͡n͏k, s̀ist̶e̵r͘?͝”̛

“I ̀t͠hi͞n̶k͟ i͞t͝’͘s̀ t͏im̀e҉ ͡ţh̵e gl͠ove̴s ͘co̡m̀è o͡f͘f͡.”

“I agr͡e͞e.̡”

She pulled on the fingers of her long, fancy gloves, and he peeled off his nice, white and practical ones. The fingers underneath were tipped with long, sharp claws. They drew a breath together.

“W̢̜ͮ̂̒͐ͩ͆Ȩ̡̟̗̮̑͒̇̂’̻̩͉̥͍ͧͩͭ̓̈́ͅŖ̶̩̱͔̤̾ͪ̽͛͛̎͢E̛͉̪̫͙̦̫͎̯ͩ͗͌͋̓͑ͦ ̷̵͍͎̟ͩ̿̌̄̉̀͜T̮̞̻̳̠̘̳̻̯̂̿ͨ̑̄̔̊ͪH͙̤̘̝͕̟̲̅ͦ̀́͟ͅȨ͙̹͍͈͕͛̋̇̂̾̄ͅ ̟̱̃́̔͆̏̍ͣͧ̽̀P̧͙͍͎̙ͥͮ̃̉̔̔͒ͧA̵̮̦̲͎̤̲̦ͮ̊̓͝R̢̼̅͗ͦ̽̎ͯ͆̂̈́T̷̻͓̥̪͙̣̭̒͜͝Y̷͓̺̜̊ͨ͂́ ̸̵̛̦̼̆̿̽ͥÇ̨̠̩̲̮͓̹ͦ͌͆R̴̝̺̟̻̗̖̤̗̩͊̿͂͛͑̌̃͌Ă̄̋ͦ͑͆͂̿͏̘̭͇̺̥̞S͈͔̗͚͉̖̣͆͑̉ͭ̐́͐͘͝Ḫ̢͇̣̿ͫ̏E̶̘̙̭͈̱̗͒Ṟ̸̜̫͎̭̦̝͔͆̔̔ͬ͗S̍͏̫̥͚͕̯̘̗!̓ͫ̋̄ͣ̒̚҉̬̬”

There was an explosion of power, and most of the guests decided that running was a good idea, but they turned to find the door had melted shut, and the walls turned into a myriad of steel wires, constantly braiding and rebraiding themselves together. Insane laughter was heard from the strangers, then horrifying screams as they got their hands on one of the guests. The floor slowly turned sticky and hard to run on. Bill snapped his fingers.

\---

Down below, the first clue that something had gone sideways was that the eyebats terrorizing everyone in the streets turned and flew back to the pyramid fortress, followed by the bubbles of pure weirdness.

\---

Bill never expected the pets and party tricks to have much of an effect on the attackers, they were far too strong, but it worked as a distraction. Weirdnessbubbles made for the best smokescreens when popped.

He had lost control of his castle completely. Several of his guests had been ripped apart and eaten, and he was starting to get an inkling about who the twins were. Many people knew what would theoretically happen if a human was turned into a demon, sure, but to see the results himself, and two of them? It was supposed to be all but impossible, but he realized he had been setting up for it to happen all along, together with the party preparations. No matter what, he did not want to be caught in a closed room with them. With a concentrated blow of power, he blew a hole in one of the ever-shifting walls and escaped.

\---

The second clue was when the castle exploded.

One of the walls blew out in a mighty crash of light, and a bright, triangular form slipped out and flew off in a haste. The rest of the pyramid kind of melted after that, dripping huge chunks of bizarritecture into the lake. Two figures came out of the ruins and zoomed into town.

Dipper watched the whole thing from the roof of a building. Well, it had been the third floor, but now it was the roof, and it had a lot of nice, ruined walls to take cover behind. He sat there, clutching the silent walkie-talkie in his hand, and watched as the winged girl in the yellow dress zipped in between the buildings. Up above, her brother, because they had to be siblings, Dipper could feel it, flew somewhat slower, searching the town with his eyes.

“W̸̛͈̯̪͘h͚̣̼̹̹͚͡e͠͏̝͕͎̞̪͚͍̀r̨̨̲͉͈e̸̷̵̻͇̖͈̞̦ ͚̺̀a̵͙͎̺͈̳̺̥r͠͏̙͈̙̠ḛ̣ ̵̰̖̝̥̹͉͔y̛̭̯̗͎͔̺͞ỏ͙͚̝̯̰ͩͦͩ͊ͭ̎̏̇͡u̴̢̻̣̱̦͔̦͕̱̍̾̚ ̡̺͖̭̘̩̇ͭ̇ͣ͋́̇h͔̜̜̬̜̙̲̺͚͗̿̅͗͡i̡̜̲̍̂ͦͮ͛̀̈ͪ͘ͅd̷̻̝̼̯̥̆͌ͯ͊͊̐i̵̯̯̺̟͈̠͚̇ͤ́ͬ͘͠ņ̪̹͙͕̳͎̯̹̑̏̔̈̽̄̒ͮ̆͘g̠̎̂̾͒͐ͮ̇̾̆,̯̫̺̞̖͖ͫ͊̅ͭ̓ͬ́͘ ͍͐͒̈ͧͩ͜y̵̝͕̤̲̬̞͔ͯ͂ͩ̌ơ̢̝̞̣̬̦͇̮̈́̔ͭ̋̉̃ͮū̦̲͑ ̴̩̥̪̖̼͓̐̾̈́͌͛i͐̕r̷͖͎̺̬̅̐̀͗̋͠r̷̡͈͇̳͉̙̹͚̤̳̾̊̿a̶͉̙͚͉̝͊ͧ͠͡ͅͅt̨̳̬̺͉ͤ͗̚͞i̱͙̹̖͑̃͂͊̐͗͋͜͡o̶͚̭̹ͮ͗̓̀̾̓̎ͭ͞ņ͈͓̘̗̗ͧ͐a̴̢̝̞ͪͩ͡ͅl̴̙̇͑ͬͦ̃͋ͭ̀̕ ͓̀͐ͩ͗͟ ǵ̗͔̬͍̱͍ͅe̢̩͔̺̪͙̮̬͇̗̕o̴̻̠͝ḿ̵̗̟̖̭e̱̩̝̱̪̫̺t͏̶̤̹͇̘͉͍͓͘ͅr̭̮̮̖y͙̖͓͜ ͟te̵̹͖͙͓̼s̢͏͚͎̹t̷̨̪̙̯͚͕͙͕͡ͅ?̤” he shouted, and the words sunk into Dippers joints like electricity.

For a moment, he thought he heard a voice from the walkie-talkie, and he looked down, but it was just static, and when he looked up, the demon with the suit hung right above the wall, looking at him.

“O̵͟h̢́, ̡̕͏e̵x͞͝cu͞s̢e me,” he said, and Dipper froze with his heart in his throat. “You haven’t seen a triangle in a top hat around here somewhere? You know, really yellow? Shouts a lot?”

Dipper drew a shaky breath and swallowed. Where did Bill fly off to again?

“Uhm, I- I think he went towards the waterfall?”

“Thanks, kid! I can usually find anyone, but the little bugger’s good at hiding. Well, see ya!”

_Find anyone?_

“Wait!”

He cursed himself the second he said it, and the demon turned back to look at him, but he had to know.

“Do you- do you know where my sister is?”

The demon tilted his head, and the other one popped hers over the top of the wall.

“Who knows where who is?” she said.

“The shooting star,” her brother said.

“Oh, yeah. Wasn’t she in that bubble over the lake?”

“Yup. Think I saw a tiny little asshole in a blue suit with the key.” He held his arms out to indicate the size of a small nine-year-old. “You should probably find him first.”

Relief washed over Dipper and he sank to the ground. He had been so scared, so horribly scared that Mabel… She was okay!

“Thank you,” he said, and the demoness waved it off.

“Pfff, it’s nothing. I’ll always be up for helping a guy find his sister, right?” She addressed her brother, “Now let’s go. I want to kick triangle ass.”

With the beating of two pairs of misfit wings, the demons were off, and Dipper sat up. He had a quest to get to.

\---

Once everything was over and done with, their hands were stained red and yellow, and the laws of nature were regaining their shaky hold of Gravity falls, Alcor and Mizar stood at the top of a cliff and watched two very human twins embrace each other for the first time in far too long.

“Do you think he recognized us?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe, but I honestly think he had more important things to worry about.”

“Want to stick around for a bit? Just to make sure it turns out all right?”

He looked at her for a few seconds before answering.

“Nah. After all, they have each other now. They’ll be fine.”

With that, they grabbed hold of reality and ripped a tiny opening to their own home dimension. The party was over. Time to go home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Extra scene!](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/132111082836/loved-the-latest-fic-only-real-complaint-was)


	11. Overcast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From [this](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/post/132152997208/i-really-wish-to-see-a-fic-with-dipper-meeting) prompt.

The day was overcast and grey, as if a heavy duvet had been thrown over the world. The way the shadows diffused into nothing and all the colors looked flat, gave the impression of a piece of half-finished art. There was a cold pressure in the air, and the sun felt like a distant memory.

Leonard sat in a booth by a window in the local Always Morning coffee shop, reading some kind of article. Rather, he was trying to read the article, but the words kept running together. Mostly, he was cursing his choice of studies. He should have pursued his ambition to become an author, or maybe he should have taken a job as a janitor. Just, anything to avoid having to see this kind of pointless babble ever again. No, he had to try to focus.

“Excuse me?”

The quiet voice was a welcome distraction, and he looked up. By the end of his table stood a young man holding a coffee cup. He gestured to the empty seat opposite Leonard.

“Can I sit here? Every other seat is taken.”

Looking around the shop, Leonard realized every other seat was indeed filled, and he remembered that he was on his fifth cup of coffee and had been sitting there for way too long.

“Sure, take a seat,” he said, and the young man sat down.

Leonard tried to go back to his article. It was just as hard to focus on as it had been, though, and he found himself glancing over at his new neighbor instead. The man wore a dark blue, hand knitted sweater with a cartoonish shooting star across the front. He had light skin, short, wavy brown hair and a rounded face. He was not bad looking, really, aside from the bags under his eyes.

He looked really sad, actually. His shoulders were hunched forwards, his gaze was turned down and he was clutching his cup much tighter than was necessary.

“Are you okay?” Leonard asked, before he could catch himself. The man looked up.

“Oh, I’m… well, not fine, exactly… I… I don’t think you want to sit here hearing about my problems.”

Leonard glanced down at his tablet with the articles he really should read, and back up at the man who looked like his entire world was burning around him.

“Eh, this article is criminally boring. Shoot.”

The man cracked a tiny smile at that, and to Leonard, that already felt like a victory. The smile disappeared as soon as it had come, though, and the man gave a deep sigh.

“I… recently lost someone very dear to me, and now I feel a little lost.”

‘A little lost’ was the understatement of the year when applied to how this man held himself. Leonard felt his breath get stuck in his throat for a moment.

“…I’m sorry. What happened?”

The man took a long drink from his cup before answering.

“It… she was old, really. We knew it was coming. It really shouldn’t have hit me that hard, but” he met Leonard’s eyes for the first time, and there was a quiet kind of pleading in them, “you’re never really prepared for these things, are you?”

Leonard remembered losing his own grandmother only a year earlier, after half a decade of sickness, remembered how his mother had cried.

“No,” he said, “I guess you often can’t be.”

Silence fell over the pair for a while. It was a natural thing. This was one of those subjects that required digestion between thoughts.

The next time the man spoke, he sounded close to tears.

“You know, she was one of the best people I’ve ever known.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. When she was little, like, barely a teen, she would fix old clothes by hand to give to charities. She kept doing that through her whole life, even when she was too busy to do things for herself. I used to tell her to take breaks, that one sweater or jacket wouldn’t make a difference, but she… ‘Bro’, she said, ‘bro, one should always do one’s best for those who need it,’ and then she’d just go back to sewing. She lived by that, you know? Made it her life’s goal to make as many people happy as she could. She sure did a lot of good for me.”

It did not pass Leonard by that this young man claimed to have been there when a supposedly old woman was young, which meant he was either lying, or older than he looked, but judging by the pure heartbreak in his voice, Leonard doubted he was lying.

“You must have really loved her a lot.”

“Always did. Always have. Always will, I guess. She’s… she’s everything to me. I’ve watched her grow up so many times, you know? And she’s always a wonderful person. She always loves me back, somehow. She keeps me safe, keeps me grounded. She’s my anchor to the world. I’d do anything for her, but I can’t stop her dying.”

He leaned back to look out the window, and Leonard tried to process what he was being told. Definitely older than he looked. Most likely far less human than he looked, and apparently heartbroken enough to tell a complete stranger everything, just because he was willing to listen. The young man- creature? He turned back and kept talking.

“She’s really the only one I’ve been talking to lately. I know I shouldn’t. She kept telling me to get some other friends, so I wouldn’t be completely unmoored when she went, but I ended up sticking with just her, and now she’s gone and I’m lost to the world. I have been trying, I really have. I’ve been trying to catch up with old friends, but it’s… it’s hard to find the motivation to, you know?”

Leonard reached out and put a hand on the- on his wrist. It felt like steel under his fingers, vibrating slightly, and he worried for the health of the ceramic cup.

“Hey,” he said, then stopped. What did you say to an unknown immortal creature mourning the loss of its only human friend?

“Hey,” he tried again. “You- this is… not the first time you’re doing this, right?”

It was mostly a guess, really, though a pretty safe one, and he let out a quiet breath of relief when the other man shook his head sadly.

“Right, so it’s… you know it’s not the end of the world. It’s shit, it really is, but it’s not the end of the world. You’ve lost your… your best friend, and it’s alright to be sad, okay? It’s alright to break down and stop functioning for a while, but…”

Again, he had to stop. The man, he looked younger now, late teens instead of twenties, he looked him in the eye, and the desperation behind those eyes was terrifying. For a moment, Leonard felt as if he was pulling the boy up from falling off a cliff, not just trying to reassure him. He felt further out of his depth than he had ever felt before, but he knew he had to keep trying. He took a deep breath.

“But, deep down, you know you can get over it. It’ll always hurt, but you can move on, talk to new people, actually smile again. It doesn’t have to be now, but you need to remember that it will happen someday. You just have to stay alive until then.”

The whole world seemed to hold its breath as the wrist beneath Leonard’s fingers tensed impossibly further. Several nerve-wracking moments passed before it relaxed, and the boy, looking about fifteen now, slumped back in his seat with a heavy exhale. He brought a hand up to wipe his eyes, and gave a shaky smile.

“Thanks, dad,” he said, and then he froze. “Shit! I didn’t mean-“

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Leonard said, holding up his hands and trying not to laugh. “We’ve all called the teacher ‘mom’ once, right?”

“Right, yeah. That’s a thing people do.”

He had his head in his hands and averted his eyes, but from embarrassment this time, not soul-crushing sadness, and that was an improvement. Leonard held out a hand.

“I’m Leonard, by the way, so you can use that instead.”

The boy smiled wryly and took his hand.

“I’m… I’m Dipper. Dipper S- Pines. I’m Dipper Pines. It’s nice to meet you.”

“And you.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes after that, drinking their coffee and watching people passing by on the street outside the window. Dipper looked older again now, slowly aging past twenty.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a while, “about all that. I shouldn’t have dropped it all on you.”

“Don’t be,” Leonard answered. “Everyone needs to talk to someone sometimes, and you obviously didn’t have anyone else. In fact, if you ever need anyone to just vent to again, I have a feeling you know how to find me.”

Dipper looked at him in surprise, and the first real smile Leonard had seen on him grew on his face.

“You really mean that?”

“Really. She did tell you to meet new people, didn’t she?”

\---

Exiting the coffee shop, Dipper felt lighter than he had in days. The bottomless darkness that had resided in his chest since Marianne died seemed slightly more manageable. Leonard was not Lionel, of course. Not anymore, but he was almost as good to talk to. He could never be the father figure from Dipper’s fondest memories, but a friend? Absolutely.

Above him, a glint of blue and sunshine peered out from between the clouds.


	12. The last sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny chapter. Big subject.

He is the sun for a few million years for the last planet with life. Their night sky is dark and empty, and they never learn of a universe outside their own solar system. He is their god and he cries for them.

They are a tiny rock in a dying universe. Many civilizations have looked up and thought they were alone in the universe, for the first time, they are right. The last vestige of life, kept alive by his power only, in the palms of his hands. He cares for them, millennia after millennia, and he tries to tell himself that that is enough, that he can keep it up forever.

Very much like the last few months of his first sister’s life, he denies the last few ages of life’s existence. He holds them in isolation in the last living corner of space, and he tries to deny that the end is approaching. He watches their struggles and their triumphs. He watches them fight pointless battles and unite to gain any knowledge they can about their world. He smothers their worst fires and nudges them away from self-destruction. He loves them, deeply, all of them, because they are the only things left to love. He spreads his wings around them and light them up in a simulacrum of stars, and he revels in their wonder. He takes every kind of childish glee in them he can.

He grows content, for a second, secure in the knowledge that they are safe and cared for, and he closes his eyes. When he opens them, a moment or an eternity later, they are gone, the planet is razed to the ground, and every pinpoint of light that was a soul is sleeping in the in-between, forever now.

He rages and despairs. He rips apart every dead star in his way in rage, and cries until his sobbing reverberates through all of reality. No one has ever been this alone, this lonely. He curses his own life in every way he knows until he is tired, and then he retreats to his home in the mindscape, to be comforted by his sheep.

He does not know it yet, but his life will still not end for countless eternities. Until then, all he can do is try to forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Art.](http://ii-thiscat-ii.tumblr.com/post/136501848315/the-last-sun-damn-mod-z-to-the-corner-forever-for)


	13. Twin Starlets-"Mine"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a thing. I've been watching a lot of vlogbrothers videos lately, and they're nice people, but now everything I try to write is narrated in John Green's voice. That makes it very hard to write anything at all, and what I do manage to write is short and poetic. That is one explanation for this.

Never once before had Henry though feeling owned could feel so right. Technically, ethically, it was a very wrong thing, he knew, for one person to own another. Owning one’s self was a basic human right, and he had always thought that taking those away was always wrong. Then he started dating Mabel Pines.

The very first time she brushed a hand over his face and declared him hers, he knew he was lost.

The way Mabel said it was different from the normal calls of ‘my boyfriend’, ‘my man’, ‘my lover’. The word ‘mine’ from Mabel came as a promise, a statement. When she said ‘mine’, she meant _hers_ , not by commitment, but in essence. To her, it was simply a truth. He belonged to her. It was obvious, a fact of life, not a thing she needed to spare a thought. The declaration slipped from her lips on its own, a half-heard whisper of ‘mine’, ‘mine’, ‘mine’ in the quiet moments between them, and sometimes ‘ours’, because you could never truly separate Mabel and her brother.

He loved those moments. Loved the intensity of emotion he could always hear in her voice, loved the sincerity of it. He loved her, simply. Everything about her. He loved the way she smiled, the way she laughed and spoke and moved. He loved her mind and her presence. He loved the way she loved him back, the burning of it, the molten iron in her voice when she spoke to him, the fire in her eyes when she looked at him. Even at the very worst of her moments, when the floor was coated in blood and he was less than human in her eyes, little more than a simple possession, existing only for her, he loved her. He loved her, and she loved him back, though sometimes in strange and twisted ways.

Once or twice, it scared him. He would think too much and end up wondering why. Why he loved her so much when she was so inhuman, when she kissed his skin with teeth that had teared into human flesh, when she twisted words and deals with a smile every day, and when she called him hers in a way that made him not entirely his own anymore. It would scare him, and he would wonder. He would wonder about the lengths to which a demon in love might go to get what she wanted. He would wonder if the level of love he felt for her was truly natural. He wondered about this, and then he threw it away. He knew, deep down to his very soul, that she would never force him like that. He knew there were chains binding him to her, and that they were just as much of his own making as they were of hers. He knew he loved her only because of himself.

He loved her being sweet and silly, and murderous and possessive all the same, and he knew he loved her in part because if he ever _were_ to fall out of love with her, to want to leave her, he knew she would let him go. Painfully and reluctantly, maybe, but she would let him go. And because he knew that, he also knew he never would.


	14. The Angel and the Star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the closest you'll probably ever get to a humanoid angel or demon from me. Just a little story from a post-god!Alcor universe. There might be more of it, there might not.

A woman walks through empty streets, though she is not quite a woman.

Her skin is white as paper, and it shines as if lit up by the sun, even as the streetlights flicker faintly overhead. From her head runs white-blue fire, burning downwards in defiance of the natural behavior of such things, and she drips blue fire as she walks. From her back grows wings made up of wide, soft feathers, just as white as her skin, and her legs end in sharp points a few fingers’ widths above the ground, but she still leaves clear footprints, alike those from cloven hooves. Her body is covered from elbows to neck to hips in fine, tightly curled wool, her proportions are recognizably human, though exaggerated, and she has two dozen crystal eyes staring from her face.

Despite this, the lower part of her face and her arms and hands are human. Elegant and beautiful and absolutely human. These features only seem to emphasize the inhumanness of her. She is an angel, and the few mortals on the street this night shy away from her path in awe. She pays them no mind. She has a purpose here.

She walks through dirty streets, which get dirtier, walks as the burning streetlights stop, walks past stray animals and half-dead people, past those who do their work in the dead of night and those who have no work to do. She looks like a diamond forgotten in the mud, but then again, one such as her would look that way even in the king’s palace. A minute ago, she saw a star shine out with a familiar light here, and she wants to find it, if only to see it, and get a glimpse of _him_ through it. It has been so long since last time she saw him.

She finds what she is looking for in a dark corner behind a building. A girl, only barely a woman, is bleeding out in the dirt, and her newborn child is crying below her. The girl is also a star, if a different one. The two of them are often siblings, even twins, but this arrangement is not unheard of either. At the entrance of the angel, the young mother musters the strength to look up, though not to look surprised.

“My baby,” she whispers, and the angel complies, picking up the child and helping the mother into a sitting position with an arm, then she supports them both as she kneels in the dirt beside them. The girl’s eyes do not focus right, but her movements are focused enough for her to attempt to feed the child what little she has. It does not amount to much more than bloodied water. Still, she smiles.

“My baby,” she laughs and cries at once, “my beautiful little baby. My little one. Is it a boy?” she asks the angel, and the angel blinks her crystal eyes.

“ _I believe it is somewhat in-between,_ ” she answers. “ _We will have to wait and see._ ”

“Aloa, then,” she breathes, “that… can be both,” and tears run down her face as she leans more of her weight on the angel, “I won’t get to see, will I?”

The angel does not answer, but she does not have to. The ground is stained darkly red by blood, and the girl can feel her grip on Aloa slip, can feel her eyes fall shut and she knows she will never have the strength to open them again. This is the only chance she will ever have to help her child.

“Then you… you promise me,” she says, and her voice is only barely loud enough to hear, but the determination behind it is real, “you’ll take care of my child. You promise that.”

“ _I promise_ ,” the angel whispers back, and then the girl finally lets go, breathing out one last time and leaving the angel with a dead woman in one arm, a child she already loves more than life in the other, and the weight of a promise hanging over her, and there is only one thought passing through her head.

_I really fucking need help with this._


	15. I love you

Henry woke up alone.

It took him several minutes to realize why that felt wrong, but then it came to him. He was not in his own bed at his uncle’s house, he was in Mabel’s, and Mabel never got up before him. In the year or so since he had started dating her, he had invariably gotten up at least an hour before her any time they slept in the same house, but now, it was even earlier than he usually got up, according to the clock at the bedside table, and he was the only person in the bed.

He sat up and grabbed his glasses, then he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes for a while before putting them on. He was still too sleepy to think as fast as usual. Aside from the clock and his glasses, the small table also held a note. A note with his name written on it in glitter pen, each letter a different color. He picked it up and unfolded it.

_Henry_ _,_ it read, _There was a thing with the thingies and some buttfaces, so me and Dipperitos went to take care of it. Should be back soon. Love you._ ♡♡♡

_-Mabel_

Henry took a deep breath and put the note down. Then he pushed his glasses up and sat with his face in his hands for a while.

He knew perfectly well what she meant by _taking care of things_. He also knew that the twins had been doing this for years, and they had always been mostly fine (except for where Dipper now owned Mabel’s soul, and _that_ was a thing he had only recently found out, and wow…) and he had no reason to worry, but he still worried. He knew the possession process was harsh for her, knew that she sometimes walked with a limp for days afterwards, that she came home with bruises and cuts, and that the people she was fighting were by definition always murderers. Sometimes, just sometimes, he wondered if Dipper even really cared what he did to her. Henry trusted Mabel, and Mabel trusted Dipper, but less than a month ago, she came back with her entire upper arm bandaged because of a wound six inches long, and now they were out there again…

The sound of the front door opening startled him out of his thoughts.

Instinctively, he held his breath and listened. There was the sound of Mabel’s glass-and-barbed-wire bat being dropped into the umbrella stand, probably staining everything with blood again. There was the sound of footsteps up the stairs and another door opening. Then he heard a voice that was Mabel’s, but not.

“Do you mind?” it asked.

There was no answer Henry could hear, but a few seconds later, he heard a few more footsteps and the sound of someone pulling a sweater over their head.

He had no clue why he did it, but as the faint sounds of undressing continued, Henry slowly opened the bedroom door and tiptoed down the hall, towards where the bathroom door stood open. He stopped just before anyone would be able to see him from inside the room, and he kept his breathing low and listened.

“I’m sorry,” said Mabel’s voice with someone else’s words (and please, oh please let that not be Mabel’s words. There was so much pain and guilt in them) and it was only barely loud enough for Henry to hear.

There was another pause where Henry assumed the actual Mabel, invisible and inaudible to him now, was speaking, and then Dipper spoke again with her voice.

“For, you know, all this.”

Another pause, and then there was a sigh and the sound of the shower turning on. Henry listened to the sounds of running water for a bit before he inched closer, looking into the room now.

Mabel’s body stood under the spray, luckily faced towards the wall. Henry could see the beginnings of new bruises on her, and the scar on her arm was still fresh and clear. As he watched, Dipper sighed again and ran her fingers over it, and over the other scars crisscrossing her body, both new and old. Scars Henry had only recently really started mapping out for himself.

“You deserve better,” her voice said, and it was only barely audible, said to himself more than to her, wherever she was floating, and suddenly Henry saw something moving in the mirror.

There, between his mirror image and the mirror itself, he could see the very transparent form of his girlfriend, gesturing in a way he already knew meant something like “you need to stop being such an angsty sadmachine, bro-bro”. He made a slightly too fast movement trying to see better, and her head whipped around, looking from her own naked body, to Henry, to the Henry in the mirror and back to Henry. She looked confused for a few seconds, then she gave a tiny shrug, put her finger to her lips at him and looked back at her brother. He still seemed unaware.

“You really do,” he said, louder this time, “you never deserved to have to deal with any of this.”

The Mabel in the mirror said a few words Henry could still not hear, and tried to cross her arms, but they passed straight through each other, and she had to settle for holding them awkwardly bent in front of her.

“I broke your ankles, Mabel,” he said, shifting her legs as he did, “and you’ve had broken ribs and a knife through your heart and more stings than I want to count. And you’ve had to cut your hair twice because you got _things_ in it, and you’ve had at least one concussion, and you’ve had so many strains and sprains and way, way too many clóse͢ cal̸l̨s-̷͠”

He stopped, then laughed a short, humorless laugh.

“And I keep doing that. Your voice is already strained, but I just, can’t, help it.”

He had leaned her head against the wall, and filled her voice with more pain than Henry thought he had ever heard from either of them. He felt very strongly that this was something he was not supposed to hear, that he never should have walked up to them in the first place, that he should walk away and leave the twins alone, but he was rooted to the spot. The Mabel in the mirror looked a little like she was too, her mouth hanging open but not moving.

Dipper sighed again.

“Just a few more years and I’ll be strong enough to do this on my own.”

Mabel automatically tried to cross her arms again, and once again, they passed through each other, but whatever she said must have been enough, because Dipper quickly amended his statement.

“Or beside you, at least. Just, anything that lets me protect you better.”

Mabel’s facial expression was conflicted, at least three different emotions battling for dominance, but she managed to give Henry a tight smile and a shooing motion, and he backed up and left the two of them alone.

\---

Ten minutes later, he sat at the kitchen table, staring at a freshly made coffee cup and wondering what he was supposed to think about the whole thing.

“Hey,” Mabel’s voice said, and he nearly fell out of his chair at the sight of a far too familiar sock-puppet floating at his side.

“Hi,” he only barely managed to answer.

Neither had anything more to say immediately after that, so for the next few minutes they just hung out in silence. He drank his coffee, and she floated around with all the glory a sock could muster.

“So,” he said eventually, “I’m sorry, about listening in on you like that. I shouldn’t have.”

“Naah,” she replied, making a silly face “you’re practically family by now, you should, you know…” the silly face dropped a little, as did her voice, “you should get to see him when he’s like that too, you know? Not just when he’s got all his emotions all locked up.”

Henry thought about that for a bit before he asked the question that had been burning him for a while.

“He showers for you, though?”

“Yep,” she answered. “It used to be kinda awkward when we were younger, but he really liked having a body for once and we needed to deal with all the shit, so we kept doing it, and then I grew out of puberty and he grew up a bit and stopped being scared of seeing me naked just because I’m his sister, and there’s usually a lot of pain after that kind of exercise, you know? And he kind of enjoys pain, while I, you know, don’t. After a while it just became natural for him to take care of the post-raid stuff. You know, simple stuff. Cleaning me up and burning the clothes we can’t salvage and getting a few hours’ sleep. He gets something like real sleep, I get to avoid immediate pain, and all I have to do is float around invisible for a bit.”

“Why could I see you in the mirror, though?”

She looked at him strangely.

“ _I_ don’t know. Usually stuff like that doesn’t happen, but I guess the Shack _has_ been getting a little weirder since we moved here at sixteen…”

Henry smiled at his sock-girlfriend striking an exaggerated thinking pose. Then he thought about her floating around for hours, invisible and inaudible, while her brother used her body to sleep.

“It does seem a little… inconvenient, though, having to float around and do nothing while he sleeps.”

Mabel turned suddenly serious. Henry had never thought a sock-puppet could look serious before, least of all a _Mabel_ sock-puppet, but she managed it extremely well.

“Dipper is like that almost all the time. I think I can handle a few hours.”

And now he felt like an idiot. How did he miss that?

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

It very clearly was not, from the way she had stopped smiling. What could he do to rescue this situation? He glanced up at the ceiling, above which Dipper would now be sleeping in Mabel’s bed.

“So, we wake him up in a couple of hours, and then you get your body back for breakfast, right?”

“Yep.”

And he would go back to being incorporeal, unseen by nearly everyone until the next summon, the next too-expensive deal.

“Say, do you think I could trade him bacon and eggs in exchange for staying physical to eat it?”

It turned out, Mabel’s smiles were just as real whether they were made of cotton or flesh and blood.


	16. For a Friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I get really really tired. Sometimes that leads to me getting ideas. Sometimes those ideas lead to me writing 1200 words in an hour and hardly needing to edit a thing afterwards. Usually, that reads like poetry.

Cassie remembered.

It was not unusual for her to remember things before her time. Between lives, she was very, very old, and she had found a life she liked. For a countless number of generations, she had been reborn to and lived the same life over and over again. Others often found it sad, but she said, hey, she might be stuck in a pattern, but it was one she liked, so why worry? The point was, she was old. She was old, and she was always the same, and sometimes the line between Cassie-who-was-currently-a-human and Cassie-the-immortal-soul got blurry, and she remembered.

Not always, of course, but every five or ten lives she got at least part of it. This was one of those.

Cassie remembered hunting game across the prairie for the first time, led by the man with the leaves in his hair. He showed her how to track them, how to hunt them to exhaustion and how to hold her spear when she made the final blow. She was a good student, he said, and smiled as he prepared to show her again. Only because he was such a good teacher, she answered, and the echo of a thousand identical words rang in her ears.

Cassie remembered knowing things no one else knew, knowing of coming dangers and approaching threats. She remembered trying, time and time again to warn people, but never being believed. Not by anyone except the old woman with the small painting of a forever-green tree around her neck, the woman who once taught her how to read. Was she sure they should not leave, Cassandra? the old teacher asked when told of the upcoming disaster. She was not scared, she answered, with the echo of a thousand identical sentiments ringing in her ears.

Cassie remembered trying to learn how to run a farm, now her father was set to be taken by the sickness within the year. She remembered the man who came to show her how the numbers worked, the man with pine trees on his buttons. He quickly stopped being so professional with her, and became something of a friend. He would gladly help her out if she ever needed it, he told her. He knew he was an unmarried man and she was a beautiful young woman, but- It was okay, she answered. She trusted him, and the echo of a thousand identical promises rang in her ears.

Cassie remembered being in-between, watching the world through nothing but her pure soul. She laughed with the soul called the Pine Tree at her side, making pointless bets for nothing about how precisely she could time her reincarnation this time. The Shooting Star was floating off to the side, not wanting to intrude. They had so many bonds, the Shooting Star, and this single one was one they wanted to leave only to their twin.

Cassie remembered contemplating hibernation for a while. She so rarely lived more than one life every three centuries now, and it had not been very long since the last one, but no. Something was afoot. Something big was about to happen within the next few years, and she felt she had to be there, had to see it with her own two eyes. It had been so long since she had last seen something new.

Cassie remembered being well and truly lost. She needed help, she needed a teacher, but there was no one. No one she knew, no one she could think of, no one who felt right. For the first time in her life filled with familiarities and déjà vus, she felt something was missing. It gnawed at her for days until she came across a summoning circle on the net. She drew up the circle without a though, read the words that seemed so unfamiliar, yet so right, and he came to her. There was an echo in his voice that she had missed for days, there was an aura about him that should have had her shaking in her socks, and he was so angry at her for even daring to call upon him for something so insignificant, but it was not a small thing to her. The thing she had been missing was back. She was not scared, she trusted him, and she knew he would be a good teacher.

Cassie remembered being in-between again, and processing the magnitude of the change that had taken place. She tried to comfort the Shooting Star as they cried at the loss of their twin, who was still there, but who would never again remember their thousands of lives together, who would never again be allowed to rest. She comforted the Shooting Star as they cried, and then pulled themselves together and renamed themselves Mizar, because it had never been in their nature to despair for long.

The girl across from her- no shit, him. He was Cassidy this time around. It was so strange to remember being female so many times when he was so definitely male. The girl across from him sipped her cup of tea and explained her plan.

“So, _someone_ needs to pull him out of his funk, right? So I thought I’d just pull together everyone I could find. Mizar, obviously. You, and the entire cult of Dippingsauce, current incarnation of the Woodsman if I can find him, a few other people. Then we could just throw this whole, nostalgic surprise party or something, what d’you say?”

Cassie remembered this girl. Lucy Ann, she had been named once. They had met a few times before, and Cassie knew who she was, what she was to Alcor. She was a smart one. Made good plans.

“Sure, I’m in,” he said. “I’ll pull the cult together, and with the mafia and soul scout network, finding the people we need won’t be hard. Just give me a time and a place, yeah?”

The miniature vampire smiled, but still looked troubled.

“Are you sure, though?” she asked. “He’s pretty crazy at the moment. There’s a good chance a lot of people are gonna die.”

Cassie remembered a thousand summonings. She remembered the first ones the best, the first one of each life. She remembered how he reacted, with surprise, then exasperation, then happiness. Relief at seeing the one constant in a life of chaos, the one smiling face that would still be there, even if she died, again and again. She remembered thousands of conversations, tubs of ice-cream and solved equations. She remembered a deep friendship, sometimes stained by desperation from his side. Remembered once getting him at his worst, and only getting out of it alive by very careful wording.

“I’m sure,” he said. “This is why I’m here.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re here for the same reasons anyone else is,” Lucy Ann said with a raised eyebrow. “To live your own frigging life.”

Cassie remembered contemplating hibernation. She was so very, very old, and it was far past time for her to sleep, maybe even fade away completely. She remembered watching her best friend and mentor for the last many thousand years losing everything, and thinking, she had already lived through so many universes, what was one more, for a friend?

Cassidy smiled.

The echo of a thousand identical smiles rang through his soul.


	17. Nerds will be nerds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt fill from tumblr. This is mostly complete silliness.

Eric was scared out of his mind. He was used to the sports jocks picking on him. It was natural, really, with how stupidly high their egos were pumped, and how much a “nerd” like Eric outclassed them in everything other than gym class and social interaction in crowds. It was not usually a big problem. As long as he ignored them, they mostly left him alone, but this… this was something else.

This guy’s name was Joshua, or something. Eric had never cared much for the guy, but he knew he was big on the football team, had big muscles and a big head, mostly filled with air and ego. He had never been much of a concern until the day he jumped Eric on the way home from school, fucking tied him up and threw him into the back of a car. Now they were in some kind of warehouse, and there was a summoning circle on the floor.

Eric wanted to say he took the whole thing bravely, that he fought back valiantly, or was quietly resigned to his fate with a smart quip on his lips, but no. He was scared out of his mind and screaming like a little girl.

“Ah, shut it,” maybe-Joshua said as he accidentally knocked over a candle he was trying to light and burned his fingers. “It’s not like anyone’s gonna miss you, anyways.”

Eric wanted to argue, but his voice mostly came out as incoherent whimpering and a string of uncreative swearing.

Possibly-Joshua started reading something from his phone in very broken Latin, and Eric tried to wiggle towards the edge of the circle, hoping to knock over another candle. The absolute panic did not help.

The broken Latin stopped, and there was a moment of absolute silence. Even Eric’s panicked breaths made no sound. Then there was a cold gust of wind through the room, the windows on the walls darkened to black, and the flames of the candles suddenly stood five feet tall and blazed blue. The intense heat of the fire was contrasted by the freezing air, and black clouds of smoke billowed from the corners of the room. For a few moments, Eric could see absolutely nothing as it covered the floor he was laying on, then it gathered in the middle of the circle and a dark figure rose from it.

“Y̷̮̟̘̱̮̖̩̠̞͎͔̘̼͖̹͚͢ͅO̴̶̙͕̘͖̞̝͎̞̙̯͢͝U̢̹͎̻̦̪̕͟͜ ̵̵͖͚̗̳̞̤͓̞̟̙̗͢͢͠D̨̙̳̘̫̪̼̣͡Á̝̼͇̪̞̭̠̘͘͘͝R̵̸̶̻̟̩͝ͅE͝͏̸̨͇̥̜̝̹̙̠͉͔̤͚̼̝̱̠̪̺ ̻̲̪͎͉̰͠Ś̷̳͎̥͈̞͖̪͎̭̕͞Ư̴̧̡̫̠͉̥͕̮̪̦͈̼͇͙͎͜M҉̧̥̩͍̳̤͚̮͖̜͔̳̝͕̦̞̠̭̦͟͢͝M̷̥̙̙̗̼͔͘͜͞O̪͉̺̣̬̱̝͍͎̫̺̪̞̤̹̲͙͢͝ͅN͏̡̢̛̲͎͉͙̝͍͔̣͎̖̼̹̭ͅͅ ҉̴̲̗̙̺̬̺̝͈̣͉̜͇͎̠͕͓̞͕̺A͞͏̨̺̤͕̣͇͖̫̝̠̳̣̫͟͠ͅL̴͉̫̭̼̹͙͚͉̳̦̬̖͉̹̭̜͖̱̙͞C̡͕͕̟͕̭̱͕̦͈̗̪͟O̷̖̦̬͖̯̝͉̟̱̖͎̭̫̕͞R̢͏̞͉̦̤̝̜̟̲̞͉̩͈̼͟͢ͅ ̶̸̛̙͔͖̙̦̻̖̥͟͟ͅͅT̷̷͍͙̥̻̥͙̼͕̳͘̕H̢͉̳̩̮̘̻̟̠̩̳̹͇̖̗͢ͅE̷̢̞͖͉̦͔͚͔̞̞̺̦̹̭̟͎̳͇͇͡ ͝҉͖̦̰͎̮̬̥̼̮͚̼̦̮͚͕̻͚̳͝D̨͎̣̯͉̠͔̖͍̻͈̤̬͚̦̹̞̀͞͠Ŕ̵̢͚̝̤̬̭̝̝͍̜͕̩̹͙͞͞ͅḘ̵̵̶͔̦͖̻̬͝À̩̞̰̰͜M̸̵̡̥̱̯͙͉̩͇̣̬͎̰͈͙̖̮̘͇͚͢͡ͅB̢̧̛͕̮̮͔̩̱͚̮̙̭͓̫͇̥̫̞̀͜Ḙ̛̝̰͕͕̪͚̪́͢͟N̷͏̧̺̼̳͚͔̝̠̥̟̻̮D̢̤̲̣̙̥̭̜̬̺͙̝̀E͏̷̥͙̥̙͡͠R̴̫̹̻̰̲̪̱͎̞̀͘͠͝ͅ?̵̩͍̯̣̭́”

Wait, what?

Eric had never been very interested in demons. He preferred comparing them to serial killers, rather than tigers or atomic bombs. Bombs were a horrible wonder of science, demons were just horrible. So yeah, he knew relatively little about demons, but even he knew that Alcor the Dreambender tended to react badly to human sacrifice.

Probably-Joshua started blathering on about something or other, mostly why he deserved to be the best player ever, and Eric wiggled into a sitting position as he noticed his panic was fading. Should it be? Alcor was not known for killing sacrifices, or at least Eric thought so, but this was still a bad situation. There was still a demon in the room, and an asshole who was already trying to kill him, and he was tied up, and he might have been wrong about the sacrifice thing?

**Hey.**

The voice in his head was loud, strange and not his own. He looked wildly around the room for a few seconds before he noticed the demon glancing at him.

**Hey, you.**

_Me?_ he tried thinking back.

**Yeah, you. Are you free today?**

Well, unless he was dead…

_Yeah, why?_

**Do you want to see the new Star Wars movie with me?**

…

Confusion.

**You do know it’s premiering today, right?**

_…Yeah?_

**Okay, so, see. This guy is really damn boring, but because of the rules I kind of have to hear him out. That doesn’t mean I can’t do anything else while he’s talking, so, I’ll make you a deal. I get you out of this alive and unharmed, and you come watch the Star Wars premiere with me. No one else I know could go, and I don’t want to go alone.**

_Wait wait wait. So, I get to live, and I get to see the Star Wars premiere for free?_

**Pretty much.**

_…Hell yes. You’ve got yourself a deal._

A mental image of a handshake and blue fire flared in his mind, and he sat back to listen to more most-likely-Joshua blathering. After a few more minutes of that, Alcor spoke.

“Sưm̨m̀ariz̛e͜d, y̛ou g̛et҉ ̢t̸o “ẁin̴ as ͘mu͢c̨h ąs y̶ou ̧c͜a̡n͟”̀, and̀ I ͡ģe̢t t̵o ͠ta̕ke ̀t̸h̷i̴s̷ ҉pȩrso͢n̛ an͡d do ẁi̕t̀h҉ h̡im͘ ̀às͢ I̴ ̡w̛is̷h̸,̨ is ͜th͏at ͞it?”

“Uuuuh…” almost-certainly-Joshua hesitated a little, thinking that sentence through before saying, “Yeah, that’s it.”

“It̕ ͟i̵s̛ a̸ De̛al, ͠t͟h͝en̡.”

There was a handshake, and then the world around Eric dissolved into darkness.

Two seconds later, he was standing on the side of the road nearby the local cinema, and facing a boy around his own age. A boy who looked remarkably like the demon. For a few seconds, they just looked at each other, then they both broke out into laughter. Eric recovered first.

“How long until he notices the deal he made means absolutely nothing?” he asked.

“Around tomorrow morning, when I break his ankle so bad he’ll never be able to play again. If he can’t win anymore, my deal’s done.” Alcor answered, still laughing.

“Oh my god, that’s horrible.”

“Hey, I could have just killed him! Now come on, move starts in fifteen minutes.”

As they walked towards the cinema, a thought struck Eric.

“Aw, man. I’m not even wearing a proper T-shirt. I should’ve brought at least one of my replica lightsabers.”

“Mhm?” Alcor said, “and what about…” he pulled a metal tube out of his pocket “a _real life_ lightsaber?” he clicked on a button on the tube, and it did indeed turn into a real, albeit white, lightsaber. Eric was stunned.

“Woefully inefficient, of course,” he continued, “but the awesomeness factor makes up for it.”

“How does it work?” Eric breathed in wonder.

Alcor got a look on his face that Eric recognized as a guy on the brink of geeking out completely.

This day could have gone worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone who asks gets a long description of the appearance and functions of that lightsaber. Because I am also a nerd.


	18. Send Invites Carefully

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My secret santa for [arcaneadagio](http://arcaneadagio.tumblr.com/). I hope you like it!

Pacifica Northwest sat on her couch and seethed. A piece of paper slowly crumpled and tore in her hands. The words “you are hereby invited…” were still legible at the top of it. How dare they? How _dare_ they?

She took a deep breath and tried to flatten the paper back out, read through it again. It was still the same thing. An invitation for a high-society fundraiser for “Human Interests”, which she knew well enough was just a pretty way to say “Pro-Nat Dickery”. She had always thought Pro-Nat was an unnecessary prettification of Racist anyways. Who did they think she was? Just because she was rich? Just because her parents were big in the Pro-Nat community? Did supernatural rights activist mean nothing to them?

She was Pacifica fucking Northwest! She was one of the best rising actors in the business! Hell, she was award winning! She had fucking morals, and better yet, she had contacts. She was rich, she was powerful, she was gorgeous, and she was damn well a hell of a lot smarter than most people gave her credit for. She was also not a good person, and they would regret pissing her off. She slammed the paper down on the table with both hands and stood up. A malicious smile pulled at her lips. Where did she put her summoning circle?

\---

“Paz, you’re a horrible person and I love you. When are we going?”

\---

The ride in the limo was not as smooth as it normally was, mostly because the driver was scared half out of his mind. Pacifica ignored it expertly. The man in the seat across from her seemed not to notice the bumpy ride at all, but considering how little even gravity touched him, she suspected he really might not.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” she asked.

“M͝in̵d̵͘͡ ̸̧͢ẃh͏a̕t̡̕?͢” he said, and the limo swerved a little further to the right than it should at the sound of the unholy echo in his voice.

“Being arm candy, I mean. You’re not usually the type to just stay quiet and look pretty.”

He opened his mouth to answer, but stopped, and furrowed his brows in confusion.

“P̕͏re̡t́̀ty̴?̢͢”

He gestured questioningly to himself, and Pacifica looked him over. He was a pitch black void from head to toe, struck through with brick-lines of golden yellow, which pulsed across his body in a strange, staccato rhythm. A third eye was wide open on his forehead, watching everything and nothing at once, his regular eyes were unblinking, endless holes of golden fire, and his mouth was filled with several sets of shark-like teeth. She knew he struck terror in practically anyone in this form, that he was further from humanity, further from reality itself than anyone should be comfortable with, but no, that was not how she saw it. She had known him for too long, and after spending most of her teenage years hopelessly and embarrassingly in love with him, “terrifying” was not the word that sprung to mind at the sight.

“Pretty,” she said with a teasing smile, and he grinned back.

Just then, the limo pulled to a sudden stop in front of the convention center. The guests who had already arrived turned to stare as the door was opened and Pacifica Northwest regally stepped out, arm in arm with Alcor the Dreambender.

\---

Pacifica was very happy she was such a good actor, and that he was one too, because judging from the way his smile was slowly widening, they were both on the brink of hysterics.

The fundraiser was well organized, to be honest. It was high-class and classy, most of the guests were people of both importance and means, and the mood was exactly as it should be for such an event. The decoration was impeccable, the music tasteful, the food and drink served looked perfect, and the program was well thought out and interesting. It had every mark of a potentially _very_ successful campaign. The second the couple walked in the door, everything stopped working.

There was a rolling silence as conversations stopped dead at the sight of them, and the sudden change made others turn to see. Mouths fell open, glasses were dropped, and more than one person started praying under their breath. The people closest to the doorway slowly backed away. Pacifica barely hesitated, and walked confidently through the room as if she was at any regular party, and as if she did not have the most powerful demon in the world at her arm. The crowd opened before her, and she had to fight to keep her indifferent expression from breaking.

The host of the event carried the look of a deer caught in headlights as she approached. His eyes flickered back and forth between her and her companion quickly enough to prove that he was panicking. She allowed herself a small smile.

“Thank you for the invitation,” she said, keeping her voice even and controlled. “I’m certainly looking forward to the rest of the night.”

“I’m… glad you could make it,” he barely managed to choke out in answer.

Pacifica smiled at him, and gave him a little nod before she walked away. As she walked through the room, outwardly unaffected by the staring and whispering, she surveyed the crowd. Before coming here, she had sat down with the guest list, going through and identifying the people with the deepest pockets, and the ones who were most likely to give a lot, then she set up a list of these people and memorized it.

Looking through the crowd, the first two people on the list were not present. Either they had never arrived, or they had already run away. Whichever worked. She identified the third one easily enough, the CEO of some large company. Time to get to work.

She walked through the room as if she owned it, because of course she did, she owned every floor she walked on, and made it seem nearly coincidental that she stopped right by the man. He, like everyone else, was freaking out, but he held his composure as she greeted him. A few practiced lines into their conversation, it became clear that the permeating air of impending death was too much of a distraction, so she sent Dipper away to get drinks, and watched the CEO’s eyes widen at her display of power.

She talked and smiled and laughed politely, and demonstrated exactly how thoroughly she mastered the game of hiding threats beneath civil conversation. She dropped hints and gave advice, and hidden in between praising the planning of the event and questioning his motives for coming, she let it be known that supporting this case could have certain consequences. Once she was sure he had gotten the message, she moved on.

\---

By the time the program of the day finally started, about fifteen minutes too late, over half the crowd was gone, and the remaining half were either scared silent or staying in defiance. Pacifica took a seat at the front of the room, and sat there with a demon at her side, doing what she did best, act unaffected. On the inside, she was jumping in glee. She had always liked thrashing things, and this event was profoundly, thoroughly thrashed.

\---

It turned out most of the speakers for the night either had fled or were having a nervous breakdown somewhere, and the program ended much earlier than it was scheduled to. This was a good thing, for Pacifica was just on the verge of bursting.

They left the convention center with the same dignity they had entered it, Dipper blipped them elegantly back to Paz’ apartment... and they both collapsed into laughter on her couch.

“O͠͞h̛ ͟͠͝m͝y ̶̡g̴od,” he said, as the void fell off him in disintegrating bricks. “Oh my god, did you see his face?”

“I knoooow!” she laughed back, rolling over and getting entangled in her own dress. “He totally thought you were going to kill him.”

“Oh, definitely. There was a very definite moment of regret over waking up that morning.”

They stayed like that for a minute more, just letting out a laughter that had been building for the last hour, and then she got up and opened her computer to a couple of news sites. The reports were already flowing in.

In the trash bin behind her, a ripped up, fancy invitation lay forgotten. At her side, Dipper excused himself to go home to his family, and left with a wish that they do that again sometime, and at the screen in front of her, reporters were screaming about an outrageous move made by the best rising actor in the business.

Pacifica Northwest smiled to herself. She left the house, her parents and her family history behind, but she kept the name, and you do not ever fuck with a Northwest.


	19. A quiet town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started as [this](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/post/137820563313/headcannonprompt)... and then I don't know what happened.

Hesekiel Agam Power, Kiel for short, led a rather quiet life. He had recently graduated from college with a degree in IT, gotten a job he could do entirely over the internet, and then moved out to the quiet town of Glendale. He somehow managed to inherit a big house out there from an old great-aunt.

Glendale was a nice place. It was the kind of town where everyone knew everyone, but only to the extent that there was still an illusion of privacy at the very least, and most people were friendly. The woman behind the counter at the grocery store often spent ten minutes talking to each customer, and the other people in line often joined in on the conversation. As shopping day was practically the only time Kiel met people at all, he found it nice, rather than annoying. Especially considering some of the locals had little enough regard for others privacy that they liked to pull strangers into their conversation if they had reason to. In the line of the grocery store was where he met most of his acquaintances in town.

“So you’ve moved into old Linnie’s house, have you?” asked an old lady with a teasing smile. The kind of smile only little old ladies could pull off.

“Uh, yes,” Kiel answered, smiling back. No one ever spoke to strangers in the city, and he found he rather liked this. “You live up the street, right?”

“Sure do. I’ve been thinking I should come by and give you a welcome, but I haven’t found the time I’m afraid. Will we see you in church this Sunday?”

“No. No I’m- I’m not… Christian.”

Kiel’s smile turned a little nervous, and he pulled at his collar. He hoped to dear demons that the star pendant he always wore around his neck was hidden well under his T-shirt. The little old lady only shrugged, though.

“Well, that’s too bad. You’re welcome to drop by either way. Lunch is at three.”

Then she paid for her groceries, Kiel paid for his, and they both went home.

Closing the door behind him, he let out a long, shaky breath. Then he pulled the pendant from underneath his shirt and held it in his hand.

He should have known it could cause trouble in a small town like this, considering which religion he _did_ follow, but he liked this place, he really did, and he wanted to keep both of them, both the town and the religion. Was that too much to ask?

Kiel’s parents had never been very religious, but there had been something there. There was a silent prayer in his mother’s voice at times, a small longing in his father’s words. Nothing they really missed, but a possibility of something, maybe. Kiel himself had never believed in bigger powers, not invisible, all-powerful gods at least, but he did kind of want something to follow.

It was in college he ended up joining the Circle of the Dreamers’ Star. A friend of his introduced him.

“We’re not really a cult,” he said. “There’s something negative about a cult, somewhat fanatical. Of course, it depends on what definition of the word you use, and there are many, but we don’t think of ourselves as a cult. We’re just a religion. Not officially, though we’re working on it, but that’s what we are.”

His friend never stuck around, and Kiel lost touch with him less than a year later, but he fit right into the Circle.

They met every Tuesday and Thursday, and sometimes weekends, and their practices were perfect for him. A sacrifice several times a week, every day if possible, but never anything big. Alcor had few preferences, but getting your own favorite snacks for Him was polite. Keeping star symbols around the house, saying a prayer for Him every now and then, and staying the hell away from Twin Souls.

Once a year, around midwinter, they had summonings. This was the only things that was always done in groups, again, to be polite. There was even a website set up to register, just to make sure no two branches - smaller circles - tried to summon him at once. This was also the only time, aside from special occasions, it was customary with animal sacrifice. Kiel had attended two of these events this far.

He loved it. It all felt so right to him. The casualness of it, the openness and respect, yet still allowing for strong belief and faithfulness. The terrifying moments at the beginning of a summoning, melting away once they proved themselves to be true believers. Believers who actually followed the few rules He set for them. The way he could love and trust and pray to an actual deity, and knowing _something_ got his offerings.

Demon worship was frowned upon, he knew, and he understood why, but Alcor was not just a demon. He was fair, and just, at times, and there were so many stories of Him helping those who had proved themselves to Him when they needed it. Alcor was someone deserving of love, and Kiel gave it happily.

He sighed, let go of the pendant, and started unloading his groceries. When he was done, and had picked up a bar of blackberry chocolate to put on the altar of his own private temple, constructed in the basement, in a room far too big and empty for that purpose, he stole a glance up at the stars placed in the corners of most rooms in his house. Drawing them had been the first thing he did when he moved in, but if he wanted to keep his quiet life, he might have to take them down.

Oh, who ever looked at peoples’ ceiling corners anyways? Who would ever even visit him? He should hide it. He should hide his pendant better, leave the stars in shadowed corners, maybe even go to church a time or two, but no. He refused to be ashamed of his beliefs. May the consequences be damned.

\---

A few months passed, and he stopped worrying. The old lady up the street did actually come for a visit a few times. Her name was Joanna, and she had apparently had a close relationship with his great aunt Lindesfarne. Once midwinter came along, he told her and the few other people he had ended up on first name basis with that he was headed home to spend Christmas with his parents, and drove to the nearest city with a circle to attend the summoning. Life went on, and he really thought this was how it would be, and he could definitely live with that.

Then the town priest died.

The town priest was a kind old man. The kind who had to exist in a town this nice, where everyone knew and accepted everyone. Kiel had spoken a few words with him in his months here, it was hard not to, seeing as the church was right across the street from his house, but had for obvious reasons never pursued a friendship with the man. He was still saddened by his passing.

The new priest showed up a few weeks later, and he seemed to be the old one’s polar opposite. He was young, late twenties at the most, and he gave Leslie at the counter of the grocery store nothing but a sharp nod and a disapproving look at her big, pink, mermaid earrings. He gave Kiel a bad feeling, and by the way Joanna described him as a “stuck-up prick”, he was not the only one.

He still never expected her to show up at his doorstep that Sunday night, looking as if she had bitten into an unripe grapefruit.

“So when do you keep service here, anyways?”

He stared at her for a good five seconds before he could answer with a confused “what?”

“New priest’s bullshit,” she said, with her arms crossed and her legs apart. “Doesn’t want to talk about anything other than the burning and smiting crap you find on the bad parts of the net. He didn’t even let the werewolves into the church, and that family’s been going there for longer than I’ve lived! So, I’m not going to go there anymore, and I don’t know exactly what it is you do with your thing here, but it has to be better than that. So. When do you keep service?”

“I- what?” was still pretty much the only thing Kiel could say.

“Doooo I need to bring a living sacrifice?” she prompted, and shook him back to reality.

“What? No! No no no, cookies are fine. Or anything, really. It’s not like I kill things every week.”

“Alright then, I’ll bring cookies,” she smiled. “And when did you say it was?”

“Uuuuh, Tuesdays. And Thursdays. But I can move it if I want, it doesn’t really matter. Uh. Five, I guess. Afternoon.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t move it for my sake,” she said, “Though some of the others might want to. We’ll just have to see. I’ll see you Tuesday, then!”

“Wait, what? How many’s coming!?” but she had already left with a wave and a smile.

Kiel stood staring in the door for a few more seconds, before he closed it and sank to the ground, whispering “oh dear Alcor, please help me.”

\---

There was indeed quite a lot of people at his door that Tuesday. Possibly as much as half the congregation. He had nowhere near enough chairs for them, but most of them were okay with sitting on the floor as long as he brought out a few blankets. Then there was the question of what to do once they were all settled.

His own, personal services mostly consisted of sacrificing a snack at the altar each night, and possibly saying a prayer or two. The communal services at college had also involved eating lunch together and catching up on the recent events concerning Alcor, if there was any. It also usually involved an actual circle. These people though, they seemed to be expecting a sermon of some kind.

At least they had brought sacrifices. All manners of cooking, pastry and snacks, and one girl seemed to have brought her pet rabbit. He ended up spending an hour just explaining the religion to them, and they seemed to take to it easily enough. Then they kind of ran him over. They decided to keep one service on Tuesdays for those who wanted to go twice a week, and then move the second one to Saturday, which was alright enough. Then they decided to move to sewing club into his living room, and he just gave up.

The next few weeks were a bit of a mess. Some people came by to help him renovate the temple, getting a bigger altar for one, since it had ended up a bit overflowing, and lay down a proper carpet. It was a very nice carpet too, nice and soft, and black with subtle, glittering golden threads. He had no idea where they got it. The men’s sewing club did in fact begin invading his living room every Wednesday, and a gaggle of women showed up Fridays to use his kitchen for baking. He also somehow had to write sermons now, which meant pulling out his old books on religion and demonology, making calls to the leader of his college circle asking for sources, and padding it all out with passages from a book that was both all fiction and mostly about Bill Cipher, but which had good morals, and improvising the rest. On the upside, both the sewing club and the baking club were very nice, he got his temple renovated for free, and he felt safe wearing his pendant out in the open. Also, they still used the church’s parking lot when joining a circle, and the look on the new priest’s face might have been worth it all.

A month later, it all almost felt like routine. Every week, most of town, from the children to the centenarians, showed up in his basement to sacrifice and pray. They even managed a circle to say some of the prayers, and he gave whatever bullshit sermon he had prepared for the day, and there was singing. He would readily admit that the first time he heard the church choir manage the heavy metal version of _May the Heavens Burn_ was the first time he thought he could enjoy this. It only took a few weeks for most of them to learn the simple Latin chant he used at the end of a sacrifice, and the children always enjoyed watching the sacrifices disappear in a poof of black smoke and golden static.

Then the routine, as routines tend to, was broken. Leslie at the counter of the grocery store was getting married, and since both she and her fiancé had exchanged their crosses for golden stars, they wanted to hold the wedding at his house.

Kiel freaked out for a solid hour before he picked up the phone and called his college circle leader again. Her answer to his situation consisted mostly of stunned silence.

“…dude,” she said eventually. “We’re not exactly a big religion. I don’t think we have any proper traditions yet. Just make something up, do a summoning even. I don’t think you can go wrong with these people as long as you do _something_. And, uh, call me back and tell me how it went.”

Well, that was no help at all.

He lay face down on the couch for a few more minutes before he got up and researched a few wedding traditions. Might as well try to put together something good.

It turned out, when he eventually invited the couple over to make the wedding preparations, that the groom’s father had already offered one of the spring calves as a sacrifice if that would be needed. They had also technically already gotten officially registered, and all that remained was the actual ceremony. The planning went smooth as a dream from there on. Two months later, everything was ready.

They held the ceremony late one Thursday night. The bride and groom, all decked out in their best clothes, exchanged their wows and their rings, and just as the sun passed the horizon, someone slit the throat of the calf, a summoning chant was read, and Alcor himself appeared before the couple.

Kiel was the only one attending who had been at a summoning before. He was the only one who was even a little used to the sudden strike of terror that always followed one, and was therefore also the only one who noticed that something was up. There was no booming, otherworldly voice or unholy fire announcing his entrance, just a confused silence. The Immortal Twin Star shot Kiel a confused look, and Kiel gave a tiny shrug back. That seemed to be enough, and Alcor raised an eyebrow and looked back to the couple.

“W̧̘̞h̠́y ̰͇ha̸v͔͇̪̥̟̪͞e̖̕ ̣̲̦̟͔ͅy͔̤̯̘̪o̟ư͉̠ ͍͚̺̣͟ͅͅs̫̠u̖͍̺͔̖̟͕m̮̞̝̦̀m͇̥̜̹̭̞o̕n̷̞̪̰͔͔͍̩e͙̻̮͟d̜͈͓͙͖ ͎̘̩̕m͙̥̰͜e͞?͓̘͟” he asked.

“Oh, Dreamers’ Star, greatest of demons,” Kiel started, “we have summoned you here to oversee the union of this couple, and to bless them in unholy matrimony for the foreseeable future. For this, we have brought you a sizable sacrifice, and we offer you a portion of every dish served at this wedding, should you want it.”

Another second of silence passed, and an amused smile grew on Alcor’s lips.

“I ̛se̛e͞,” he said, then “W̛͢h̡͠y̛̕ n͡ot̡?” and he reached for the couple’s hands.

The blessing was quick enough, leaving both bride and groom with new scars on their hands, but happy, and Alcor took His leave. At least it seemed that way.

An hour into the party that followed, Joanna came up and nudged Kiel in the ribs, pointing out a man in the crowd he had never seen before. It turned out it was because she had never seen him before either.

“Think the good Lord decided to stick around, maybe?” she asked with her trademark teasing smile.

Kiel only smiled back and followed the man with his eyes, and when the man walked outside, away from the crowd, Kiel followed.

He found Alcor standing frozen in the middle of his garden, looking out over town. Not frozen like a person standing still, but frozen like a statue, as if the wind in the air and even time itself had no way to touch him, and Kiel’s breath caught in his throat. Summonings were almost never a private affair, and he had never, ever expected to be allowed to be alone with his Lord like this. He had no idea how to react. Then Alcor turned towards him and spoke, with only the barest of echo in his voice.

“I think I’d like you to explain what exactly is going on here,” he said. “Not that I couldn’t look into it myself, but that is always so boringly objective. Your version of the story is probably much more amusing.”

So Kiel explained, and at the end of the explanation, Alcor was laughing.

“Oh, that is priceless,” he said. “That man comes here wanting to cleanse to town, and all he does is let a demon in. That kind is always the most fun to mess with.”

He laughed a bit more, ending it in a long exhale and a content smile, and he looked back out at town.

“You know, a year ago, I never would have come here. It’s too nice a place. Almost my antithesis, in a way. Too many years of too much belief, of the very best kind. It’s everywhere, and it’s seeped into everything, and it would hurt me worse than the strongest of constructed wards.”

He looked back at Kiel, who had no words to answer with, and thus just stood and listened.

“Do you know what the funny thing is, though? The best thing? That hasn’t changed. That energy is still here, but now it’s letting me in. To have that kind of power directed at me, _for_ me, it’s… new. It’s strange, and new, and I think I like it.”

“I’m glad,” Kiel said.

“Yes you are,” Alcor answered, and it was just a whisper, but he was so close, when had he gotten so close, they were barely an arm’s length apart, and his eyes, staring into Kiel’s, were dark and golden and endlessly deep- “You really, truly believe in me, don’t you?”

“I do,” Kiel answered, and Alcor regarded him with a look he could only barely begin to decipher, and then he made half a shrugging motion and muttered something that could have been “might as well”, and he reached out and there was a clawed hand grabbing onto Kiel’s hair, pulling his head back, and lips over deadly sharp teeth were pressed to his throat, right at the underside of his jaw.

Kiel was scared out of his mind, heart racing faster than it ever had before and his life flashing before his eyes, but he stood still. Because he worshipped this demon. Really, honestly worshipped, and if Alcor wanted to kill him, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. As things stood, though, Alcor did not want to kill him, and the iron grip on his hair let up after only a few seconds, and Alcor stepped back. He stepped back to watch as Kiel gasped for breath and sank to his knees, and then he turned around and was gone.

Kiel rejoined the party about half an hour later, having had to pull himself together by laying on the grass for a while. Aside from Joanna, no one seemed to notice he had gone, or if they did, they never mentioned it. She got one look at him and gave him the same smile she always did, and he could only smile back. Eventually, the party died down as the food was eaten, the drinks were drunk and the newlyweds set out to start their honeymoon, and the routine started up again.

Kiel Power led a quiet life, just how he liked it, just where he wanted it, and never, ever alone.


	20. Old man Tyrone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short and sweet. Dipper _can_ pretend to be human if he really tries. Well, kind of.

Old man Tyrone Pines down the street was the favorite of all the children.

His door was always open for them, and even the few times he was away (no one ever knew where) they were welcome to walk in and play in his house or his garden as long as they kept from breaking things. When he _was_ home, which he almost always was, he would let them watch the scariest movies, or tell them the kind creepy stories their parents never let them hear, and he always had candy or cookies ready.

Old man Tyrone was strange, but nice, and they all knew they could trust him.

He always had a bedroom ready for anyone who needed a place to stay, and a quiet living room for those with too many siblings and too much homework. He had a smile and a towel for those who came home in heavy rain and realized they forgot their keys, and a listening ear for those with too much on their mind.

When Anna came running at his door because her mom had gotten a new boyfriend, and she thought he might kill her little brother, Tyrone had followed without hesitation. He had said a few choice words to the man, and taken the children to stay with him until he was gone. For most of the street, it was the only time they could remember seeing him angry. The man was gone within the day.

Mostly, Tyrone was just a funny old man who told creepy stories. Stories the parents turned a blind eye to, mostly because they trusted him to never, ever harm them.

\---

Tyrone Pines had never married, he said he wasn’t the kind to, but he did raise dogs. Poodle mixes, he said. No one knew what they were mixes _of_ , but general consensus was that whatever it was, it wasn’t dog.

The small and white ones were doubtlessly the most happily adorable dogs in existence, and every child on the street had begged him for a puppy at least once, but he never let them do more than play with them.

The black ones were very different. Some of them were the size of great danes, and they all had sharp teeth they bared readily. They were excellent guard dogs, but just like the little ones, he let them freely roam the house. They were very well trained, he said, and they were, obeying the smallest of movements from him with a dangerously intelligent glint in their eyes. They worried everyone who hadn’t yet seen the way they went meek as lambs around children.

\---

Many who had grown up on that street remembered Tyrone in his forties or fifties, just as kind to children, just as strange towards everyone else. He must have had a job, but no one had any kind of clue what it was. He had given himself sixty years, he said, whenever anyone asked, and he never explained. He had always said that.

The old ones on the street remembered him as a young man, just turned twenty, as he said. He said he had given himself sixty years, and they all thought it was a joke, but he kept saying it, and he kept not explaining, and they eventually understood that it _wasn’t_ a joke, but what it was, no one knew.

The old ones remembered young man Tyrone Pines, just moved into a house big enough for a whole family, though he said he had none of his own. Tyrone Pines with the terrifying animals, the mischievous smile and the _something_ in his eyes that no one could quite put their fingers on, but eh, he was a great babysitter.

(Some of them remembered three years old Melinda going missing for a day, and everyone being horrified but Tyrone, who only laughed and said he was sure she would be fine. They all thought he was just being a dick, because how could he say that? How could he say that when no one could find her and the chances of finding her alive were shrinking by the hour? And they thought so until he showed up with her at her parent’s door, and she said she had gotten into the back of a truck on accident and been driven half across the country, but Tyrone had simply walked in and picked her up as if he knew exactly where she was.)

\---

Tyrone Pines was gone sometimes, and usually he was there, but no one ever saw him coming or going. He always had cookies or candy out, but he was never caught baking, he never bought them himself, and he never had them brought to him. He told the strangest of stories, and insisted they were all true, yet he never explained where he had them from.

He had given himself sixty years, he said, and when the day arrived that he had been staying there for those sixty years, he disappeared. The house was sold to a family moving in, and there was not a hair in a corner or a scratch on the floor from the dogs. A little bit of investigation made it very clear that a man by the name Tyrone Pines had never lived there, nor had he ever really existed. The house had officially stood empty for decades.

The whole thing was accepted with a collective sigh of “I always knew there was something strange about that guy,” and a silent agreement to not worry about what that something was.

(If the children on that street tended to grow up to be surprisingly good at demonology, that was probably a coincidence.)


	21. Toby, or not Toby

He had just wanted a break. Just a small breather for a while, while Maddie was at school. Just a few hours to not have to pretend, not have to spend any energy on staying physical, not have to try to forget that he only had one child now…

Just a few hours on his own in the mindscape. He had expected to be alone.

“You aren’t really welcome here.”

“Yet you haven’t thrown me out.”

The man leaning against a doorframe in the mindscape version of the Shack looked painfully familiar. He had Toby’s bright, light, yellow hair, Toby’s old burn scars, Toby’s one blue eye and careful smile, yet the way he held himself was wrong. The faux-relaxedness that was so much more Ian than Toby, with a hint of something else.

Dipper turned as expressionless as he could, refusing to show weakness in the face of this, but his hands still shook slightly, and his wings curled protectively around his sides.

“What do you want?” he asked, and the soul in the doorway smiled.

“What? Do I need a reason to come visit my old dad?” and that was not Toby.

Toby could tease, sure, he had learned that after a while, but never like that, never mocking, never so defensively.

“You’re not my son,” Dipper said through clenched teeth, and tried to hide how he was slowly sinking his claws into the back of a chair.

“I was, though. For a bit. Toby was.”

“Yes,” he said, and he smiled a smile that was mostly a baring of teeth, “but that’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re, not. Just. Toby.”

The soul flinched, and blinked, and his eyes (eye) were Toby’s, were Ian’s, were something else’s entirely, were Toby’s again. His expression turned guilty and apologetic, and he shifted his stance until there was really just Toby in it.

“I- no. I know, but… I kind of am?”

A small growl slipped between Dipper’s teeth, and Toby- the soul put its hands up defensively.

“Not like that! Not like- I mean, I am Ian too. And, you know, that… other guy, but- okay, look. I’m… kind of… new? To the whole _dying_ thing? I mean, I’ve only done it like, three times. Maybe a few more, really far back, but the- the assimilation of a new life into the separate _me_ isn’t going as fast as it eventually will. Heck, I don’t think there even is a real _me_ yet. It’s all kind of a mess. I think what I’m trying to say is, at the moment, I’m still mostly Toby.”

Dipper clenched his hands into fists, and felt his claws sink right through the chair and into his palm.

_“What do you want?”_

“I-” he hesitated, and his expression was so sad, so sorry, so singularly _Toby_ , that Dipper had a hard time staying angry. Had a hard time staying anything but deeply mourning. “I really just wanted to say hi, before I disappear for good.”

They looked at each other a little while, and Toby flickered, ran his hand through his hair and it was yellow, was red, was yellow again.

“I- I think I should go,” he whispered, and Dipper gave up.

He gave up on pretending, on holding back, on trying not to think of this soul as his lost son, and he walked two steps and pulled the damn thing into a hug.

“I loved you, you stupid little boy,” he said into his hair, and Toby hitched a breath in surprise.

“…I know,” he said, and hugged back. “I know. I’m sorry.”

They stood like that for a while. Toby flickered only slightly, and Dipper tried and failed not to cry. Neither knew exactly how much time had passed before Toby’s flickers got worse, and he pulled back, wiping at his own nonexistent eyes.

“Tell- tell Maddie her brother loves her, yeah? Always will, even if he isn’t around anymore.”

Dipper just nodded, not trusting his voice to hold. Toby stepped back, then turned to walk out the door, but stopped, hesitated, turned back, hesitated again, and finally drew a breath to say it.

“For all it’s worth,” he said, “Bill is just as gone as Toby is.”

Dipper looked up sharply, and Toby, who was once again not just Toby, shrugged.

“The only advantage humans have over demons is their will, right? It’s how you managed to kill him the first time around. And, back when it was just him, between lives? Maybe, but now? Say what you want about Toby, but the kid has a damn strong mind. So breathe, okay? Bill isn’t coming back.”

The soul turned again to walk, then looked over his shoulder with one eye that was Toby’s, one that was Ian’s, and a grin that was all _him_.

“I won’t let him.”


	22. Origin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been in this fandom for over half a year, and I haven't written a proper origin fic yet?  
> That has just changed.

It was chaos.

It had been chaos for days, maybe weeks, time had been inconsistent lately, but this was even more chaos.

There was a giant rip in the sky. An open wound, leaking things that should not exist on this plane of existence. The last few hours it had been slowly widening, eating into the natural sky with world-shaking _wrongness,_ signalizing the rapidly approaching end. Around them in the forest as they ran, creatures which might have been animals once, might never have been anything, stared at them with unblinking eyes. There was no wind, but there was the sound of it, and no one had ever cared enough about the details to explain where it actually came from. They could sometimes only see a few meters in front of them for the rolling clouds of darkness, but they ran with purpose.

They knew what Bill was planning now, knew it for real, and they knew how to stop it. Theoretically. They were perfectly aware that their actual chances for stopping it were miniscule, but they had to try. It was success or death, one way or another.

The point of rapture was easy enough to find. It was the spot where the rift had first been unleashed. Mabel remembered where it was with a bit of prodding. It was the epicenter of the current apocalypse, would be the center of the coming end of all, and it had to be the centerpoint of their circle.

Circles, rather. They needed a lot of them, and they all needed to be connected, and it all needed to be set up at about the same time, and that is where the chaos came in.

The most important ones might be the focus points. Dozens of pre-prepared circles, which had to be placed in a circle of about a kilometer in diameter around the epicenter. And then there needed to be one in the middle.

Each person had been given a certain amount of locations and pieces of cloth and been told to set them up within an hour. If a single one of the circles failed, or if they were even a little too slow, there would be no saving the world. Exactly _how_ the world would end was irrelevant, though there were many theories. The important thing was that it _would_ , and they had to stop it. They had to succeed.

It was with this in mind Dipper and Mabel hurried as carefully as possible through the set-up of their second-to-last circle. It was with this in mind they looked up in panic as the sky tore open further and the trees shook around them.

Dipper took a few precious moments to call up his great-uncle on the radio.

“How are we coming along? I think Rapture might be coming early!”

The static on the radio was terrible, but they could still make out Ford’s words.

[I have two left. Everyone else seem finished. You?]

Dipper chewed on his lip for a bit, making a few quick calculations.

“We’re practically done! You get those two and we’ll get the center!”

[Dipper! Do you know how dangerous that is?]

“You know you won’t make it in time! We’ll be in and out in ten minutes! We can do it!”

[…]

[Be careful.]

With that, Dipper turned off the radio, pulled a spare circle out of their backpack, and handed the pack to Mabel.

“Okay,” he said. “You get the last focus point on your own, and I’ll run and get the center. Okay?”

A part of her wanted to argue, but the sky was cracking open above them and she knew as well as she knew anything that this was the only way they would have enough time. And she trusted Dipper. She knew he could do it. She nodded quickly, and then they ran their separate ways.

\---

Dipper ran.

He had run more the last few days than in the entire rest of his life put together, but he hardly felt tired. He was panicking too hard for that.

It was okay, he told himself. It was okay, it was okay, it was okay. Simple operation. Get to the center, set up the circle, get out before everything blew to hell. He had loads of time. No problem. It was okay.

He skidded to a stop once he got to the right spot, and dropped to his knees before his momentum had properly ended. If he skidded his knees, he was too panicked to notice.

Simple operation. Spread out the circle, weigh it down with rocks, activate it with the proper chants and small, silver objects, then get the hell out of dodge. He had just stood up to run when he heard the telltale sound of ripping fabric, and oh.

Oh.

\---

Mabel stood up after completing the last circle with a breath of relief. She knew perfectly well that there had been arguments for her and Dipper going together only because they were worried she would mess it up, be too careless with something, but she thought she had done rather a nice job.

Either way, she had finished her part. Now the only thing was to have Dipper come back from the center, and everything would be ready for the grand finale.

She jogged back to see if she could meet him on the way, and stopped at the third circle from the middle, a few hundred meters away. Being closer when everything went down would probably kill her, so she would wait there for Dipper to come back.

\---

For Dipper, time stood still.

The last few days, everything had been chaos, but now, it was calm.

There was only him and the circle, and his mind was totally, perfectly clear.

The cloth had ripped, almost to the middle, breaking the circle as thoroughly as burning it would. He had no way to fix it in time. There was nothing around to hold it down precisely enough… aside from his own hands.

In maybe as little as a minute, the sky would crack open all the way, and all the energy Bill had been gathering for the last thousands of years would come pouring out. The myriad of circles they had been setting up would then channel it all to the center, to the exact spot where Dipper would be sitting. The resulting explosion would be big enough to kill a demon, let alone him.

He sat down, pulled the frayed edges carefully together, made sure the circle was whole and unbroken, and then he sat back and waited.

He was not scared.

Not yet.

He did not have to wait for long.

\---

Mabel paced.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Where _was_ he? He should have been back by now. They should be running, getting as far away from the circles as possible.

Maybe he had already gone, and they had just passed each other?

Nah, he would have come back for her.

Then what was _taking him so long?_ It was a short run, and he was good at this, and maybe he had tripped or something? Maybe something important had come up, and he would have to take a minute longer? Maybe he had broken an ankle and was laying helpless out there?

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Aaahhhrg!

The forest shook around her again, and she had just enough time to think _half a minute more and I’m going after him_ before the sky fell to pieces, she was thrown onto her back by the biggest explosion she could ever be able to imagine, and heat strong enough to scorch her skin and set fire to her sweater washed over her.

\---

Not dead.

He was, surprisingly, not dead.

He had felt more than seen Bill materialize above his head, right where he was supposed to. He had seen the circle under his hands light up, felt it burn into his fingers. He had felt more than heard the shockwave from the potentially world-destroying collection of energy converge around his ears, and yet, he was not dead.

His hands were burnt badly enough that he thought he would never again feel them below the wrists. Similarly for his legs below the knee. He had only been able to cover one eye with a shoulder, and the other seemed to be completely blind. He was sure he had more broken bones than anyone had ever survived before, and possibly a punctured lung or two. With how painful existence in general was at the moment, it was hard to tell.

Somehow, though, somehow he was still alive.

\---

Her first thought upon landing was _pain._ The second was _Dipper._

She stumbled to her feet, taking a few moments to catch her balance and pulling her burning sweater over her head, noticing but not caring about how it pulled at her newly burnt skin. Then she ran past the circle through the incinerated ash that used to be a forest.

They had won.

She knew they had won, or else the world would not still be around, and she would be happy about that later, but first she had to find her brother.

And Bill was still around, apparently. She could hear his voice. It sounded weird. All strange and echoey and uncontrolled, but it was definitely him.

She would never, ever trust anything that sounded like that.

She tried running faster.

\---

Bill was talking, above him, and he would have talked back if he could find the breath to.

The damned creature was falling apart, though, so that was a relief. He was shaking himself to pieces as he spoke, bits and pieces falling off and hitting the ground with sounds that made no noise on the physical plane, and a water-like, yellow liquid had started seeping out of lines in his surface.

“C̨̢̙̮͓̼͜Ļ̨̟̹̜̺͔̮̠͎É̵̮̜͘ͅV̼̫̤̻̭͎͜E̛R̷͢͝,͠ ̡͞Ç̢L̛͡EV́ER. V͡E͝҉̼͚͇̘̣͔͙R̝̜̻͇͞ͅY̜͞ ͝͠ C҉̷̛́͜L̕͟͟͜E͜͝V̨͘҉̕E̶̷̡̧R̡̨̛͟,” he said, and the words cut through the air like a dull knife. “S̸͜O͏ ̨̙̭̹͓̳̠̙̻̹̱̜̜̘̣̙͎̖̻́͝͡T̙̻̖̗͍̗͈̖̜͢H̹͓͚̩͇̭̯̝̻̟̰̪͉͈̣̩̕͟͡ͅI͏̵̯̭͉̼̯̼̠̥̝̺̝̦̳̣͉̭̤̬ S̸̶͟ ÌS ̡͘ H̬̘͙͘O̷̼̬͡W̨͏̯͙̺ ̠̝̪̫̥͇̳͜Ỳ̡̰͔̝̤̰̞O̟̦̞̝̭̱͎̺͜͞ͅU̱̜̤̪̞̺̳ ̴̩̯͕͉̼Ḓ̷̱̣̻̬͔̻̜I̠̙E̗̪̫.” and then he half dived, half fell towards, through, _into_ Dipper, and then there was another kind of pain, and this was somehow worse.

He screamed, once, with what little air he had, and he thought for a moment it might be better to just give up, to just give in and die, and let the demon do as he wished, but then…

\---

“DIPPER!”

She had spotted them easily enough, and Dipper was broken and burned, but he was still alive, and that was what mattered. And Bill was there, and he was falling apart, and she thought she might just get to watch him die, but then he dived straight into Dipper, and Dipper _screamed_ , a noise so broken and wrong and absolutely horrible, horrible, _horrible_ …

And she screamed too. Screamed his name as she ran towards him, as he screamed again, louder this time, angrier.

She watched him and only him as she ran, and therefore nearly ran headfirst into the barrier that still remained on the innermost circle, about five meters from where Dipper was.

She only avoided burning her face off on the overloaded barrier because Wendy came out of nowhere and crashed into her from the side, throwing them both to the ground. She struggled to get free, to get up, to get to her brother, but Wendy held on and held them both down, and that girl was _strong._

“Let GO!” Mabel shouted, and her brother continued to scream.

“NO!”

“LET GO!”

“NO!”

“LET GOOO!”

“NO!”

(Years later, when she tentatively poked at those memories for the first time, she realized Wendy was just fifteen, and was probably panicking just as much as she was, and that she was only trying to keep her from killing herself on the barrier, but at the time, she was just being an enemy.)

They stayed there for what might have been half a minute, might have been an eternity. Mabel kicked and screamed and bit, but Wendy held on, and around them, more people arrived, attracted by the screaming.

Both Stans looked about ready to jump headfirst into the barrier themselves, but they held each other back, for the first time in decades on the exact same wavelength.

Candy and Grenda held onto each other’s hands, both crying from a mix of intense emotions. Pacifica stood behind them, pressing up against them and, not crying, no, crying was too small a gesture to express what she was feeling. Too strange a gesture. She caught herself hating her parents intensely for the very first time, not for how they treated her, or what they taught her, but for never having taught her how to _feel_ properly. Because she was walking into this blind, and she was feeling so much and so many things she had no words for.

Soos just stood. He was made for fixing things, for finding broken things and making them better, but there was nothing he could do here. His friend, his far, _far_ too young friend, whom he had thought could handle anything, was dying in front of him and there was nothing he could do.

Wendy held on, and was now continuously muttering _no, no, no_ into Mabel’s hair, and Mabel struggled against the grip with all she had.

And in the middle of the circle, Dipper screamed.

\---

Eventually, the screaming stopped, if only because he had no more voice to scream with. The last barrier also dissolved, and Mabel got free to run over to her brother, but by then, he no longer had the senses to notice her presence.

She held him close to her, begging him to stay, to wake up, just to open his eyes, until he started getting blurry around the edges. He went fuzzier and fuzzier, more and more transparent, while still shaking from the fire coursing through his veins, and she held onto him until it felt like touching smoke, and then he was gone.

Mabel curled up on the ground and screamed until there was nothing left in her.

\---

(He woke up a day later in a grey field of grass and emotion and thought. He held onto a sheep that was a nightmare for a day more after that, shaking in pain and wrongness as his very being healed itself, reconstructed itself, and forever bound Dipper to demon, demon to Dipper, welded the two incompatible parts together into a whole without any regard for mental or bodily stability. It felt longer than that. It felt shorter. Time was less put-together than it used to be.)

\---

It had been three days, no, just two days and change, since the incident.

In Gravity Falls, the apocalypse had just ended. In the rest of the world, the apocalypse had just begun. In a certain ramshackle tourist trap, neither of those things mattered much to anyone.

Two days and change, and since she stopped screaming, Mabel had not said a word.

She ate, a little, and she slept, a lot, and unless someone kept an eye on her, she would leave, and they would find her at the edge of the crater in the forest, crying to herself. Trying to get her away from there was the only thing that got a proper reaction out of her. Often, she would simply cry herself to sleep, and they would carry her home like that.

Phone lines were busy everywhere, and streets were almost worse, so at least the parents were a concern no one had had to deal with yet. No one really had the energy to deal with something like that right now. No one had much energy for anything other than wishing, and hoping, and praying that there was a chance.

It had been two days and change, and this was their last hope.

\---

Dipper felt much better to be honest.

He was back in Gravity Falls, somewhere in the forest. He found his way to a place he knew easily enough. The pain was almost completely gone, only a residual soreness reminded him that it had been there. They had saved the world. They had really, honestly saved the world, and he was coming up on the Shack now, and he was going to talk to his family, and they would be angry at him for worrying them, and happy to have him back, and then everyone would be allowed to relax.

Really, after the near end of the world, it could only get better, right?

\---

_“Mabes, I- I think you’re the only one who can see me.”_

_\---_

_“Hey, bro, what’s up? You looked all weird for a second.”_

_“Huh? Oh, nothing. It’s just… you know those weird impulses you get sometimes? Like, ‘I could totally push that guy down the stairs’?”_

_“Yeah? Were you gonna push me down the stairs?”_

_“What? No! It was just a weird impulse is all.”_

_“Really? Cause you looked kinda spooked.”_

_“…It was a pretty strong impulse.”_

_\---_

_“Dipper? What’s- Wow.”_

_"Mabes, I-"_

_"Wow, you look..."_

_“I look like Bill.”_

_“Whaa? Noo. Okay, maybe the top hat’s a bit much, but you look great!”_

_“Really?”_

_“Really.”_

_\---_

_“I keep wanting to kill things. People, even. I don’t know what to do about it.”_

_“Hey. Hey, it’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, but it is as long as you don’t actually kill anyone, right?”_

_\---_

_“…I think my teeth are falling out…”_

_\---_

_“Dipper! Dipper, are you okay? You were all gone for a while, and I think the walls started bleeding and Mom and Dad were freaked out really bad. What happened?”_

_“I didn’t- I- I didn’t want to see that. I didn’t want to, but I can’t stop it, it’s everywhere and I’m scared, Mabel. I’m so scared. There’s so much and I don’t know what it is.”_

_\---_

_“Okay, so your eyes are a little weird now. So what?”_

_\---_

_“Mabes, I- I think I’m a demon. I think I got whatever made Bill Bill, and I think it made me a demon.”_

_\---_

_“I’m so scared.”_

_\---_

_“I wish they would see me.”_

_\---_

_“Please.”_

_\---_

_“I cut myself on my claws and I liked it, Mabel. I wanted to do it again. And my blood isn’t even red anymore.”_

_\---_

_“Help me.”_


	23. Pain medication

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short and pointless. Fluff.

It was supposed to be just them on their own for a night, just Dipper and Lionel, while Belle had a sleepover with friends. They were planning to watch a few movies, and maybe talk about things, and just have a nice father-son night together. They had both been looking forward to it.

Instead, Lionel found Dipper curled up at the end of his bed, clutching at his head.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and Dipper looked up, his eyes gold on black for once.

“Headache,” he answered, and the pain was as audible in his voice as it was visible in his eyes.

Lionel sat down on the bed and reached out an arm, and Dipper crawled up to him and leaned into an embrace.

“You get those?”

Dipper made a sound that might have been a huff of laughter under different circumstances.

“Turns out shoving omniscience into an almost human mind is a really bad idea.” He sighed, and tried a smile, which turned into a grimace before it had a chance to begin. “I hardly ever get the _really_ bad info dumps anymore, but this still happens every once in a while.”

“Do- do you want an Aspirin or something?” Lionel asked, knowing it was pointless.

This time, Dipper actually did laugh.

“Thanks, but… that wouldn’t really work.”

For a little while, they just sat there, Lionel holding around his son and wishing there was something he could do. Then Dipper made a small sound, like a cut-off whine from a kitten, and he remembered.

“There is something that works on you, though.”

Dipper looked up questioningly, and Lionel continued.

“I mean, okay. About a week ago, I caught Belle trying to smuggle a handful of Yggdrasil into the house. I don’t know where she got it, but I could guess what she wanted it for, so I confiscated it. I still have that. Do you think…?”

“That sounds very nice actually,” Dipper said, and Lionel nodded and got up to fetch it.

When he came back with the small, unassuming box, Dipper sat at the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. He looked up and put his hands out in a silent request as Lionel closed the door behind him.

“I kind of feel like I’m doing something wrong,” Lionel said, sitting back down on the bed, and Dipper snorted.

“No, I’m sure there’s several perfectly moral reasons for giving your kids drugs.”

He picked the grassy leaves out of the box and rolled them up between his hands before lighting it on fire with a thought. Then he put his hands to his mouth and breathed in, the pain melting out of his shoulders almost immediately.

“…seriously though, this was exactly what I needed. Thank you.”

They sat there in silence for a little while, as Dipper breathed and the room slowly filled with the distinctive smell of burning Yggdrasil. After half a minute or so, Dipper slid down and dropped his head onto Lionel’s lap.

“You okay?” he asked, and got nothing but a vaguely affirmative humming noise in answer.

After a few minutes, Dipper rolled over onto his back and opened his eyes, which were blown nearly all the way. Lionel instinctively stroked his hair like he would a cat, scratching behind his ear, and Dipper’s eyes went half-lidded. Lionel bit back a laugh at the sight.

“Are you still conscious?” he asked.

Dipper blinked, lazily, then closed his eyes again and visibly fought to get the words out.

“Kinda,” he said, and it was slurred and hard to make out. “Just a little.”

His eyes stayed closed, and Lionel did laugh now, and continued stroking his head. A few minutes later, Dipper made a small noise and curled up on his side, smoshing his face into Lionel’s stomach.

Then he started purring. Just a small vibration to begin with, but it quickly turned deep and rumbling, hitting a frequency that just felt… nice.

Another few minutes after that, it tapered off again, slowing down until it stopped, and it was clear that Dipper was completely asleep, calm and blissful and feeling nothing but warmth, and love.


	24. Let the sun rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because we love her.

They told you vampires never grow old.

You would tell them that was bullshit.

You would, if you could, but they are all gone now, and you… you are old.

You thought you were old when you were five thousand, just about, and the world turned on its head around your ears, and you were right, in a way. You were not the oldest vampire alive at the time, though for a while you thought you might be. You asked him once and he said there were others.

(The world turned on its head and brought him with it. (Should you feel bad for feeling happy?))

Less than a thousand years later, he popped by without warning to tell you that the last of them had succumbed to the chaos. Congratulations. You were officially the oldest surviving vampire. You had ice cream together to celebrate.

(You both knew it was in spite. (A joke. (Sarcastic ice cream.)))

You were old then, you thought, but vampires never age, and you were not surprised to find you felt the same as ever. You could still run faster than any human, see further and hear clearer even than most vampires. You could still climb up straight walls fast as lightning, feather light. (Being small has its advantages.)

(You could still drag a man three times your height off the street without a trace. (Morality. Who cares about morality. Your best friend is a _demon_ for god’s sake. (Your best friend is your only friend. (Shut up. Your mind is wandering again.))))

You were old. You are old. You have known others who were old too. Trolls live hundreds of years, up to a thousand if they are lucky. (You are older than that.) Dragons can live for a few millennia. (You are older than that. (Oh, so much older. (Twice, three times as long never seems so much, but it is. So many years. So many centuries.))) Demons can live approximately forever. (Not quite that old. (You never envied him anything.))

At your ninth, tenth millennia, you noticed your fangs were shorter. Not by much, but enough to notice. Your hair was just as dark and thick as ever, but it grew slower. Your nails too. You were old now, oh so old, and you were slowing down. They told you vampires never grow old, but they also told you vampires were undead, and that was wrong too. You are still biological. Your hair still grows, your heart still beats, you still have a metabolism, your muscles still work and your brain still keeps your mind working. All biological systems grow tired eventually. At least your mind was still as clear as ever.

(You ignored the way it went on tangents now, the way thoughts built in your mind like they had never done, even when you were a child. (You were a child for far too long.) (You forgot the way your train of thought sometimes got lost beneath other trains of thought. (You forgot the way some of them had no substance, just the same words repeated over and over again, because you forgot to stop thinking them. (You forgot the way you forgot things you had always remembered.))))

Almost eleven thousand years old, you felt a sting of pain you had never felt before. You felt a soreness in your muscles that should not have been there. You felt tired sometimes, even though you had eaten, and even though you had slept. You noticed your eyesight was not quite as clear as it once had been, and you could no longer hear the smallest insects in the air. You tried not to worry about it.

(You worried about it. (You did not have as perfect control over your own mind as you always had. (It kept you alive once, your mind, kept you quiet and small and out of trouble. Let you survive this long in the first place. (It is slipping, Lucy Ann, what will you do now? (When did you start thinking of yourself as Lucy Ann? (It’s what he knows you as. (When did he become such a big part of your life?)))))))

Five centuries later, you walked into the sun and it hurt your eyes, and you felt a sting of terror. It was silly, oh so silly, it had been almost ten thousand years since you were last scared of the sun, but now it hurt your eyes, and you were scared. It was only your eyes, though, not your skin, not the burning it once would have been. You started wearing sunglasses on sunny days, because you still loved the sun, still remembered what life was like without it, and you still loved the warmth on your skin, but your eyes, it hurt your eyes and you were scared.

(You are fading, Lucy Ann. Withering away.)

The sunglasses were not enough. A few hundred years later, your sight at day was as bad as a human’s, and your night vision was only slightly better. You climbed to the top of a building one night, and it took you twice as long as it would, only half a millennia ago. (Once at the top, you were hurting. (Your bones could no longer heal properly from the wear and tear they faced. (Your fangs were dulling)))

(You no longer remembered what your name had been. (You no longer remembered the last time you called yourself something else than Lucy Ann. (When was the last time you spoke to another human being, again?)))

When you hit twelve thousand, you realized you were never going to make it to thirteen.

(You remembered another lost child who never reached thirteen, and you lost control, started laughing and sobbing hysterically in the middle of a busy street. (A man asked you if you had lost your parents. (You were hungry, so you asked him for help. (He was still alive when you were done. You had never eaten much, being so small, and lately you had been eating even less.))))

You never wanted to die. As a child, (and a newborn,) you fought yourself back to life of blood and darkness. At a thousand, when they tied you up to burn, you cried at the sunrise because you still wanted to live. At five thousand, the world changed more than it ever had before, and you kept going without pause. You still do not want to die, but you realize it is not so much a fear of death as it is a wish to live. You could easily make it another few thousand years if you wanted to, you know, but you are old, oh so old, and you know survival from being alive.

(Are you more scared of death, or of the pain of dying slowly? (Are you scared of losing yourself? (Are you scared of losing everything else? (Is this running away? (Where has your mind gone, Lucy Ann? (Where has it gone?)))))

You watch the sun rise.

No sunglasses this time, you want to see.

You scratch his mark into the ground and you know your hands are shaking, and you know you are doing this because you know it will only get worse.

You call his name, once, and he comes immediately, quietly.

No overdramatics this time, not like he used to.

It is a little dramatic, of course. Dipper without drama would only be dip.

(Your jokes are deteriorating faster than you are.)

He comes to you and he smells like death and danger, he tells all your instincts to get up and run. You have come to love that smell over the ages.

You have so many things you thought you might say to him. There are so many ways this conversation could go. You could remind him of the past. You could ask him about the future. (You have no future. (For a second, you are sad you never made any children. (For a second, you wonder if you still can. (Do vampires grow too old for that?) That thought lingers only for a second.))) You could ask him how he’s been. You _should_ ask him how he’s been.

“You’ve grown up,” is what you say instead.

“So have you,” he answers, but you know what he means.

If you look closely, you can still glimpse the twelve-year-old in him. He has grown up on the outside and you have grown up on the inside, but you are old, and he is still so painfully young.

(You are leaving him alone, you know? (Shut up.))

“It’s been a while,” he says as your mind wanders, and he doesn’t mean since you last met. (Though that is probably true too.)

“I’m tired, kiddo,” you say, and you smile, and he understands, and he doesn’t understand, and he hates that he knows but can’t know, and you… you are tired.

He sits down beside you and offers you a smoothie, like he has done since the first few centuries. You’re not really hungry, and consider declining, but you accept. Seven thousand years and you still haven’t figured out how to make them like he does, how to mix the cream and blood and make it work properly. (You suspect he actually bends time and space to make those smoothies right. (You think it’s worth it.))

“Twelve thousand years,” you say. “It’s been a good life.”

He agrees with a hum and watches the sun with you, though whatever it is he is seeing, you doubt it is the sunrise. He is not crying. (You suspect he has been, the last few days. (Or weeks.) (Or months.) (He knew this was coming. (He always knows.)))

“You’ve been a good friend,” you say.

“So have you,” he answers, and this time he means it wholeheartedly, and he means so much more.

(Fourteen-fifteen times, you have pulled him back to himself. (So many times more has he come to you on his own, for a familiar face. (He will miss you. (He will burn the world in your absence. (You can’t know that.) (You don’t care.)))))

“Take care of yourself, kid,” you say, and you reach out your hand to him, and he takes it, sealing a deal for which no words are needed, a deal he never wanted to make.

And you take one last breath.

And you leave.


	25. Love and loyalty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very belated valentines. I love you all.

Love.

Love was not a thing nightmares thought of very often. Never, actually, for most of them.

In the wild void of the Mindscape, where all nightmares were born, life was kill or be killed. You ate things that were smaller than you, avoided things that were bigger than you, and kept a fragile armistice with anything about the same size. There was no companionship, nothing but hints of friendship, and survival dominated all.

The nightmares of the Flock had for the most part been born and grown up in the wild, and had come to the Master’s fields as adults. (Aside from a few, like Devil’s Child, who had been found fighting off five other wild nightmares on his own, and was adopted immediately on account of being an incredible badass.) The dreams, having no method of survival on their own, were almost all found and taken in as lambs, but the nightmares remembered being wild.

Coming under the protection of the Master, aside from giving them a constant form, granted them safety. It was for most of them the only incentive to come. It never took long before it was no longer the reason they stayed.

Meeting the Flock was always a strange experience. Going from having to be wary of everything, having to watch your back at every turn, to meeting creatures you could trust, who would watch your back for you. It often took a while before new nightmares learned to relax around the ones they would call their brothers and sisters. The Master himself was a whole other matter.

Demons were Death for wild nightmares. They were the biggest things there was, and many of them ate anything. Bumping into a demon was a surefire way for a nightmare to die, so they avoided them like the plague. Even bound nightmares tended to fear their masters, because the masters were just as likely to view them as easy snacks or replaceable tools, as they were to simply ignore them.

The Master was different.

He gave them power and protection, he never harmed them, and he asked of them only that Flock would never harm Flock. (That rule was broken exactly once. It was an incident they all preferred not to think about.) He fed them and healed them and played music for their sakes, and all he ever asked in return was companionship, and a certain degree of loyalty. They could lick his face free of blood on his bad days without fearing his anger, and they could and would annoy him deliberately, just for the sake of showing a newcomer that there was no danger.

He loved them, and that was different, that was new.

He loved them, and that was something they had no words for, but it was something they could feel to their cores. The Master was huge, and endless and dark. He could crush them between his fingertips without a thought, reduce them to ash with a breath, but when he touched them, it burned with a different kind of fire. There was fire in his eyes, when he looked at them, fire in his voice when he said their names, fire in the traces his fingers made against their skin, and it was warm, and sweet, and it only burned a little.

They came for safety, for stability and the promise of peace. They stayed for the companionship and chance to keep their lives indefinitely, but they learned soon enough that they would trade every piece of that for the fire. They would die for him, if only he would let them, and they would live for that feeling of fire and sugar they learned to call love.

They did not think about it often, not because it did not mean the world to them, but because you never think about the air you breathe, the earth you walk on. They were stained by love, soaked through with it, and they loved him in turn, loved each other. (For they were all of them made of thought and emotion, and the fire clung to them, tainted them, seared into their edges and became part of them, and they wanted it no other way.)


	26. Unthinkable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You asked for it. We always hurt the ones we love. It's what makes us authors.

It was a day like any other for the Flock, to the extent a day was a logical measure of time in the mindscape, anyway. There was nothing particularly exciting happening, which was how most of them liked it. They milled about eating grass and chatting with each other. Every once in a while, one of them phased out into the waking world to influence a dreamer, and their departure drew the longing glances of the dreams.

They all wanted to go, the dreams. Not that they disliked the fields of the Master, but it was all they had ever known, and they were never allowed to leave it on their own. Because they would be eaten immediately, of course, but the void still seemed inviting. Still, home was home, and they could always badger the master into bringing them along with him for a day if they got desperate enough.

The dreams were mostly situated in the middle of the Flock, as an instinctual defense against enemy attack. To get close enough to even catch a glimpse of their white and golden wool, one would have to walk through a big group of large, dark and terrifying nightmares. For example the one known as Krans, who was currently walking through the Flock himself.

Krans was a reasonably new sheep, having come to the Flock only a few weeks earlier. He tended to stay at the periphery, slightly away from the others. He also spoke very little, preferring to avoid conversation if possible. As a result, no one knew much about him, but he was Flock, and he was their brother, so no one would ever really mind his quirks.

Now, he walked through the Flock with no apparent goal in mind, but making his way towards the dreams. While they were located in the middle of the Flock, they were all spread out rather far, and the closest dream, named Thalia in her youth, noticed him approaching immediately. She looked up curiously and went to greet him.

She had no time to say anything before he locked his teeth around her neck.

\---

Elsewhere, Dipper cut his sentence off in the middle, with a particularly bad profanity, and left in a hurry, scared to see what could get the Flock worked up into this kind of panic.

He arrived to find three nightmares fighting to hold down a fourth, and Thalia, sweet little Thalia bleeding out on the ground.

\---

The Master came the moment they called him, cutting silence like a knife through the sudden, horrified confusion. It took the moment of a breath for him to see what had happened. By the time he exhaled, the silence was deafening.

He sat down in the grass beside Thalia, with his back to the four fighting nightmares, and picked her up carefully, healing the worst of her injuries with a thought. She shook in his arms, and tucked her head in closer to him, trying to hide from the world. He stroked her head to comfort with claws that were long and sharp enough to show his state of mind, even as he was gentle with her.

“You okay?” he asked her.

“I was so scared,” she said, looking up at him, “I thought I was going to die I was so scared.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” he hushed at her, “It’s all gonna be okay, Thalia, I promise. I’m never going to let this happen again.” He stroked through her still-bloodied wool a few more times before he put her back down. “You should be fine with a bit of rest,” he said. “Would you want to come spend the night with me, or would you rather stay with the Flock?”

“I-” she hesitated, and looked from him, to the Flock, and back again. “Um… Could you stay here? With me?”

He smiled fondly at her.

“Of course I can,” he said. “You just lay down somewhere and rest. I have a little something I need to do, but then I’ll come back, okay?”

She nodded and walked away, and he stood up, took a deep breath, and, finally, turned around to look at the sheep on the ground.

They had seen the Master angry before, obviously. They had seen him scream and rage at the idiocy of the world. They had seen the quiet, terrible fury for wronged children. They had seen him rip the earth to pieces in wrath. This was a hundred times worse.

He was furious. Absolutely, paralyzingly furious, and beneath that was a deep hurt, a pain and sense of incomprehensible betrayal so strong that the world around them vibrated from it. Up until then, they had thought it impossible for something like them to cause something so big in him. Up until then, they had never once had the true extent of his anger directed at them, but now it was.

With a single move of his hand, he told the nightmares holding Krans down to move aside, and they did. The ram was now held down by nothing but sheer terror. Then the Master moved forward and stepped down on his throat, applying just enough pressure to make movement painful and difficult, and then he spoke.

**“̸̗̻̺W̴̨̘h̷̩̱͎y̡͇͙̠̱”̛̦̱͕̀͡**

The word was less of a question than it was a command, a demand for an answer, which never came. After a few more seconds of terrified silence, the Master let the sheep scramble to his feet, and he spoke again, in a voice that was quiet and controlled, a thin sheet of silk over cold steel.

“I ̡c̶an ͝f̕ór̢gi͝ve̵ yo̡u҉ a lo̷t ̴of̧ things̨. ̨If̡ ̡yòu’͢r͡e͞ a͝nn͡òyińg̛,̸ ́or̸ r̷i̢di̶culous͘, ͝or mi҉ld͞l͝y͢ ̨insub҉o͡r͜d͞iņa͘t͠e, I ͡c̨a̵n̢ fo̵rg͝i͏ve͟ t҉h͝at̸. I͝f ̛you̕ ̢m͘ak̵e̶ mi̵s͞taḱes ͝o̸r fućk̨ ͢thing҉s̨ ̧up̀,̡ ͡I can͝ ͏fơrgiv̵e̴ ́t͏h̨a͜t̕.̛ _This͏,_ I͘ ̶ ć̡͟a̡̨͟͠͠ń̵̸̡’̀͟͜͞t̵̛”̷̛́́

He got down on one knee, slowly, with the kind of care you would use for armed nuclear missiles, to be on eyelevel with the petrified sheep in front of him.

“̕Y̛o̢u͝ ̛w͢e͜rę ͠ _m͝ine̸_ ,̢” ͢he said, and for that one word, the pain in his voice vas louder than the rage. “̶I _l_ _҉_ _ov͡e͞d_ y͟ou,͡ and ̵yo̧u _b͜ètraye͟d_ m͞e.̨ O͜n a _whim_.̶”

Time might not work so consistently in the mindscape, but the past tense in that sentence spoke loudly. The Master grabbed the traitorous sheep by the neck and disappeared, and they all knew what would happen to him.

\---

When the Master returned, there was no more anger left in him, just hurt. His hands were clean, but he smelled of blood and death, and he looked so tired.

He sat down carefully beside where Thalia was resting, and she looked up at him.

“Is he gone?” she asked, and he sighed deeply.

“I never want to have to do that again,” he said, his hands shaking as he picked her up. “But yes, he’s gone now.”

He stroked a hand over her wool, and took notice of the bloodstains still present around her neck.

“Has no one cleaned you up?”

She shrunk in on herself at the question, looking down as if in shame.

“I don’t want their teeth near me.”

He hugged her closer, closing his wings protectively around them both.

“Would you mind _my_ teeth?” he asked, and she looked up and shook her head after a moment’s hesitation.

He did not point out the irrationality of that, did not tell her that none of her flockmates would ever dare or want to hurt her again, because she knew that, and he knew that she knew, but she had just been attacked from an angle no one expected, and she was allowed a bit of irrationality. Instead, he held her close and licked her wool clean until there was no visible trace left of what had happened.

As she slowly fell asleep in his arms, he lay down on the grass, and one of the nightmares standing vigil around them approached.

“This will not happen again, will it?” she asked, quietly, not to wake Thalia.

The Master closed his eyes for a moment, pained even by the thought of the recent incident.

“No,” be breathed after a second. “No, it won’t. I had- I had to, pick him, apart, to make sure that I knew. That I knew why this happened. But I know now. I know, and I won’t let it happen again.”

The nightmare nodded, satisfied with that, and then she lay down next to him for comfort, because they all needed it. Soon, the whole Flock was there, gathered and asleep, as close to piled on top of each other as they could, because they had been hurt today, and they would each of them do all they could to protect each other from it happening again.


	27. The Exorcist

Loraine had just finished cleaning up the altar after the evening’s sacrifice when there was a frantic knock on the door.

Late-night visits were not all too rare. As long as the temple was open, people were welcome to come there to sacrifice or pray, or to get spiritual advice. It was one of the most important things with a communal temple, she thought, her only regret was that her circle was too small to keep it open at all times. This did not seem like one of the normal visits, though, there was too much urgency to it.

She opened the door to find a dishevelled man, no jacket, even in the cool October air, looking at her with desperation in his eyes.

“We need help,” he said, before she could even get a word out in greeting. “We need an exorcism.”

Loraine’s mind grinded to a halt at the words, and she opened and closed her mouth a few times before she found anything to say.

“And you came _here_?” was what came out.

The man looked down and made a gesture unique to the emotionally exhausted.

“You are _some_ kind of religious leader, right? Please. It’s our son.”

Two things fell into place in her head. One, this man honestly had no idea what the Circle of the Dreamers’ Star was, and had come to their door out of pure desperation. Two, she needed to help him.

She nodded.

“Just… give me a few minutes to get my stuff, and I’ll come,” she said, and he deflated in relief.

She wrote up a short note to hang on the door, explaining that the temple was closed early because of urgent business. Then she pulled out her star pendant and offered a quick prayer. An exorcism? Really? She had no idea how to do one of those. She was just your average ringleader, for goodness’ sake. She did _weddings_. But denying this man help was a non-option. She had to try, at the very least.

She glanced down at the star in her hand, gilded iron with a simple carving of an eye in the middle. It was old, and the gilding faded at the points. It was not the prettiest accessory either, but silver was simply not the right material to use for a demonic symbol. It had been her grandmother’s once, and had been in continuous use for the last fifty years at least. If anything could work on something like this, it was that.

Taking a deep breath, she dropped the star back under her shirt and pulled on her jacket. On the exhale, she felt a little more determined. Then she walked outside and locked the door.

“Alright,” she said, “where to?”

He opened a car door for her. She got in and they drove off.

“I’m Loraine, by the way,” she said.

“Johan,” he replied, “My son’s name is Kim.”

“How old is he?”

“Eight.”

There was a minute’s silence while Loraine digested that.

“Fucking hell,” she breathed, eventually. “What, exactly, happened?”

“I don’t know,” Johan said in a pained voice. “I don’t know how he managed. He got his hands on some grimoire somehow. Neither my wife nor I have seen the thing before in our lives, but it was open on the floor when we got into his room, and Kim… wasn’t really Kim anymore.”

He stopped to catch his breath, and it sounded like he was on the verge of tears.

“We… we tried everything we could think of, but we don’t really know anything about this stuff, and it was hard enough just to stop it hurting Kim. Every so-called expert we’ve tried calling turned out to be a fraud. One of them was the type who thinks kids listening to the wrong kind of music’s worthy of an exorcism. She actually used the word ‘misbehaving’ at one point, and I had to tell her that no, he’s not misbehaving, he’s swearing in languages I’ve never heard and tried to chew his… arm… off.”

“Fucking hell,” Loraine repeated.

She was scared now. Really scared. This was an actual demon, a dangerous one, possessing the body if an eight years old boy, and she had agreed to come fight it. This was probably the most dangerous thing she would ever do, but it had to be done.

She took a deep breath and breathed out slowly.

“Johan,” she said, “I can’t promise I can fix this, but I promise I’ll do anything I can to help, okay?”

He kept his eyes on the road and bit his lips, but he nodded in gratitude. They passed the rest of the drive in silence.

The house was in the middle of an average suburb, just a normal house. He led her up the stairs to a bedroom with blue-painted walls filled with children’s drawings. A woman sat in a chair beside the bed where her son lay tied down. She looked as if she had cried herself dry. The kid looked… worse.

Both of them looked up as Loraine entered, but her eyes were drawn instantly to those of the figure on the bed, and she knew to the bottom of her being that whatever it was that was looking at her through those eyes, it was _not a child_.

Aside from the fact that his eyes were tinged an orange colour no human eyes should have, he wore a mocking smile with a level of spite in it that felt so dreadfully wrong on the face of a child.

The creature grinned at her as she took in the sight of the rope burn on his wrists, where he had been tied down to prevent any further harm, the extensive bandaging around his left arm, most likely covering bite marks, and the more visible bite marks on his lips, because they were the only thing the creature could reach now.

“Aww, another one already?” it said with the voice of a child, and she felt her stomach turn. “One’d think you’d learn to give up soon.”

Suddenly, she realized her fear was fading away. It was fading and being replaced by white-hot rage, starting in the middle of her chest and spreading through her veins like molten iron.

“I think you two should leave the room,” she said to the parents, and after a bit of wordless back and forth between them, they did.

She kept eye contact with the creature on the bed, this _thing_ that _dared_ … just for _fun._ It struck her that this was what most people thought of when they thought of demons, and she understood with perfect clarity why her own religion was so controversial. Then she almost laughed despite herself at the thought of comparing her Lord with something this disgusting.

“Confident, ain’t ya?” the creature mocked her. “So what’re you? A televangelist? Come to read bullshit script at me until you get too close and I bite your fingers off?”

“Not exactly,” she said, and pulled her pendant off to hold it in front of his eyes, and the creature went dead silent.

She held still for about a minute to watch the smile fall off his face as realization set in. When it finally moved his eyes back up to meet hers, there was barely-concealed fear in them.

“…you wouldn’t,” it said.

“Wouldn’t I?” she snarled back.

“You wouldn’t,” it said again, more confidently. “You guys don’t do stuff like this. You’re not fighters! You wouldn’t bother him for something like this, would you?”

She leaned closer, getting as far up in his face as she could.

“You hurt a child, you little bitch,” she said. “Don’t you _dare_ tell me what I would and wouldn’t do.”

She stayed for a moment until the fear was apparent in his eyes, and then she sat back with an exhale.

“You are right, though,” and his eyes lit up again, “I really don’t want to have to bother him, so I’ll give you a chance. You leave the kid alone, you never come back and you never pull anything like this again, and I’ll let you be, sound good?”

The creature stayed silent, seemingly thinking it over, but every nervous glance at the gilded star let her know what the answer would be. When the silence had stretched on for a minute, Loraine leaned forward again, bringing it closer, and the creature recoiled back, fighting to get as far away from the symbol as possible.

“Okay! Okay!” it said, “I’ll go! Just... don’t do anything drastic.”

The kid’s body fell unconscious as the demon left, and a few seconds later his eyes flew open again, a nice, normal, blue-grey colour.

She immediately started untying the bonds around his wrists, and he clutched onto her and cried the second he was loose. Once his legs were free as well, she picked him up and carried him out of the room to where his parents were waiting. After that, there was a mess of hugging and crying, and somehow all four of them ended up drinking hot chocolate on the couch. Kim eventually stopped crying for long enough to explain that he got the book from a weird guy who sometimes hung around his school, and his mother was on the phone with the police less than a minute later.

When Loraine finally got up to leave, with the intention of going straight home and to sleep, Kim grabbed a hold of her shirt to stop her.

“Um,” he said, “is it gonna come back?”

“No,” she said, getting down on a knee, “that thing is never coming back, I promise.”

He still looked troubled, though, and, well, being possessed did tend to leave the mind vulnerable to attack. She pulled her old pendant off and hung it around his neck.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll give you this, and then all the bad things out there will be too scared to ever touch you.”

He looked up at her with shining eyes.

“Really?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, pointing to the star now hanging against his chest, “because the guy who owns this is the scariest of them all.”


	28. Midways and Naming Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Half crazy worldbuilding, half fluffy sheep. So, basically me in a nutshell.

There is a place in the spaceless and temporally distorted void of the mindscape known as the Midway Bar. For all intents and purposes, it looks like a normal wood and concrete building. Outside its walls lies the dark and feral not-space of the wilderness, lawless and prowled by creatures of all different power levels, but inside them, the mood is light and civilized.

Alike most other spots in the mindscape that are reminiscent of the physical world, it is the domain of a demon of some power. What its name is, few know, but it is called the Bartender. Along with the Bartender, the bar is populated by several nightmares. One of them is always situated at each side of the door, greeting patrons, explaining the rules to newcomers and throwing out any rule breakers. These bouncers are bigger and stronger than nightmares usually get. The rest of them are smaller, with quick feet and many hands. They tend to the patrons, tending the bar alongside the Bartender on busy days, flitting between legs to take orders and wait tables, and speaking to the patrons to help them find tables, friends or themselves.

The rules of the Midway Bar are simple enough. Within its walls, you are not to intentionally harm, emotionally or physically, anyone or anything, and you are required to pay your tab before you leave. There are a few reasons why these rules are almost never broken.

As a rule, demons dislike each other. Being in the presence of other demons is always a risk, and there is always a degree of animosity. They still sometimes have to interact. They still sometimes manage to make friends. The Midway Bar is where these things happen. More than half of all deals between demons happen there. It is where the most dangerous of mind-based creatures come to hang out. It is where information spreads, rumors are discussed, people are encountered. Demons come there, yes, but so do nightmares, both bonded and feral, lost dreamers, other such creatures, and even, once in a blue moon, angels. Anyone with enough of a mind to understand the rules are let in, and the bouncers never forget a face. It is where creatures come to show off their power, where bonded nightmares come to brag about their masters, and where those who are lost or broken come in search of a safe haven. If you want to know anything about anyone in the mindscape, you need to come to the Midway Bar. No gains you can get from breaking the rules there are worth being banned.

The bar can serve you very nearly anything. You want the extract of a plant that has been extinct for several million years, fermented by a recently genetically modified kind of yeast, with a side of calamari? The Bartender has it. As payment, it also takes almost anything, from money through precious personal items and body parts to memories and souls. The most expensive of orders are normally served with a warning about the price, and an option to return the order unconsumed.

This particular story did not begin with any orders of that magnitude.

It began with a small gathering of demonic sheep around a table. They enjoyed bowls of the freshest, juiciest grass Earth had to offer, and glasses of everything from fruit juice to straight vodka. They were out celebrating a day they liked to call the Naming Day.

A small number of days earlier, as counted in the physical world, the anniversary of the event known as the Transcendence happened. It was cause for celebration among many creatures, as it marked the day where passage between worlds became more than a privilege for the select few. Among Alcor the Dreambender’s familiars, though, among the nightmare sheep, especially among these seven nightmare sheep, the event was best symbolized by a day that came a little after. The Transcendence was a memory of pain for their Master, but the Naming Day was the day they learned who he was and what he meant. It was the day they gained individuality, in the form of names.

They did not celebrate it every year. Normally, the day passed them by like any other day did, but if any of them ever noticed it coming up, they always went out to celebrate. Their own wool was a rare enough commodity to buy them most anything they wanted, and they spent the day eating and drinking, talking among themselves, and bragging to other guests about their good fortune. That was what they were doing now.

“Oh, he’d never hurt us,” That of Teeth boasted to a squirrel-shaped nightmare at another table. “The Master wouldn’t even _want_ to hurt us, ever. In fact, if we get hurt, he fixes us right up again, just like that!”

“Eeeeh…” the squirrel said, twitching a few of its ears, “I’m not sure I believe you. Why would he do that?”

Teeth grinned playfully, raising his spiked head in pride.

“It’s a secret,” he said, nearly sing-songing. Most of the other six sheep smiled along, and one of the biggest ones even stuck his tongue out.

“I wouldn’t doubt it so much,” an undefined something hissed in passing, having caught the tail end of the conversation. “Their master’s known for being a bit of an oddball. No-offence-intended!”

The last line was tagged on as the smallest sheep raised her head and gave the creature an irate look. She was quickly settled by a nudge from her sister, who spoke up.

“Oh, we know,” she said. “There is no offence to telling the truth. Our Master really is amazing, though.”

“Everyone knows that,” a raccoon creature chimed in from a corner. “Greatest demon in all existence and all. Is he really safe to be around?”

“Yyyep,” Teeth said, smiling smugly all the while, but he was interrupted by Grazer of Eternity before he could get much further.

“Our Master is the greatest master anyone could have,” he said, lilting his voice as he always did, in a rhythm he seemed to be the only one to follow. “He feeds us and helps us and names us, and sometimes he smiles at us, too.”

“Did he really name you?” the squirrel asked, a little more convinced and a little more excited now.

“Actually,” Teeth smiled, “he let us name _ourselves_.”

“I do not think he was all that happy with our choices,” Horace the Hooved Horror muttered into his bowl of grass.

“And he stiLL LEt us KEEp them!”

Killer stood up on the bench again now, talking a bit louder than she had intended, but no nudging from Lolonja would be enough to make her sit down this time. Lolonja realized this, and instead took the chance to switch Killer’s glass of vodka out with her own, decidedly less alcoholic, drink.

“NO,” Killer said, stomping her hoof at the table. “No you- you gotta get this. He didn’t like them, like, he really didn’t like them, and I think he thinks they’re stupid now too, but y’know- He’s, you know? It’s like, he doesn’t like them, you now? But we said we liked them so he did… He did, you know? Right? He uses them anyways, an’ _that’s_ what I’m saying.”

Nodding her head as if she had just imparted deep and important wisdom, she sat right back down again, to her sister’s relief. Killer usually was pretty smart as long as her brain was actually functioning. Unfortunately, alcohol did not do good things to the higher brain functions, and being smart was apparently not enough to stop her getting into a drinking contest with a sheep at least six times her weight. On the other side of the table, Groknar the Destroyer still looked unreasonably smug over having won. All this time and he was still peeved that she tended to take control in combat situations. And possibly at the fact that she kicked his tailside whenever she really tried.

Lolonja had to shake her head. For all they were her siblings, they could be a real group of terrors when they tried.

“…I didn’t catch _any_ of that,” the raccoon admitted, “but you really like him a lot, huh?”

“Yeah, we do,” Teeth said, at the same time Lolonja said, “Yes. Yes we do.”

More nightmares started showing up now, attracted in equal amounts by the sounds of gossip and drunk shouting.

“Isn’t that a little weird?” one of them asked, and once again, the sheep tried to explain, but they were cut short by another nightmare.

“ _Our_ master would probably kill me if I got that close.”

“Have you ever touched him?” one asked.

“Did he really kill Afardow the Prideful when he was eight, or is that just a story?”

“Maybe he’s only planning to eat you when you grow strong enough.”

At this point, Killer was no longer the only sheep who looked annoyed. Groknar, who had never stopped growing and was now the size of a medium-sized pony, stood up and bared his teeth. The closest of the insectoid waiters was trying to calm the situation down, but the nightmares kept chattering.

“Do you even know who you’re talking about?”

“Yeah, well, we’re at the bar. It doesn’t matter who you are.”

“Can you please take the fight outside if there’s going to be one?”

“Aw, we’re not fighting…”

“Do you think he’d even come save you here?”

**_~~ “̷̵̫̳̭̘͍̟̯͉̮͖͕̩͍̝̼͂ͤ̐̈͢ͅͅP̴̨̛̳̙̱̜̬̐ͨ̊̋̍̀l̵̤̯͓̰̫͎͕̝̖͇̳͓̜̩̙͕͗̈́͛̐̓͑̈ͭe̢̦̯̯̠͓͚̠͎̙͛͋̒̚̕ă̷̷̛͔̬̣͇͇͈͉͍̲̹̳͈̥̞̮̈́͌̆̾͌ͫ͌̀ͮ͛͜s̸͖͈̼̝͈͕͇͔̤̺ͭ̆͌ͮ̾́ͯ́̃̈́̏̃ͦ̓̓́̚͟͜͞ͅę̶͔͎̗̘̰̩͍̯̮͑̅ͮ̊̈̊͆̈ͮ̐͒ͤ̆͢ͅͅ ̶̾ͫ̎̔̋ͣ͌̄̓͆̒̓̔ͧ̓͆͟҉ ~~ _ ** **_~~ ̤̘̱͕̦̘͖̗͈̲̺̮̣͈̯c̛͖̭͍͕̲̜̗̝̲͇̖̜̜̝̰̣̩̤ͥ̄̅̄ͥ̈́̓ͭͯ͝͞ả̧̪̻̰͍̺̤͔͔̖̹̫͎͎̪̫̞̤̟ͥ̐̾̇́̔̏ͩ̇͆̒̾͝l̢ͭͧ̈́̑̌ͪͫͯͮͮͤ͑ͦ̋ͫ̔̂̚͠҉ ~~ _ ** **_~~ ̱͕͎͚m̵̵͎͚͓̯̰̻ͩ̽̉͒ͯ̑̍ͦͤ͋̂ͧ͂̊̀͡ ̧͕̦̭̙͖͚̬̣̳̺̺̝̙̼̦̮̳ͫ̒̓ͨ͐͐̈̿̒͒ͯ̀͟͡͞ͅd̛̹̬̫̠̘̟͙̪̹͉͚̋̌̐͋̔̈̈͋̋̃͂́̏̋ͯ̓ͬ͂̑͜͟o͆͑̈͋͋͌̋̂͒҉ ~~ _ ** **_~~ ̴̢̬̫̠̘̤̮͓̖͍̖̯͉̩͎͞w̶̰̳̤͕͓̬̲̦̤͉̩ͮͧ̆ͯ͌͢n̴̷̴̤͎͕͍̦͙̣̿ͤ̎̓̑ͧͥͨ̃̃ͧ͗͢͝ͅ.̖̣̻͚̻̎͛̾̿͊̉ͯͯ͗̅͌͊̓ͥͧ͟”̛̟̲̳͉̭̹̥͙̣̏ͤ̀̏ͥͩ͝ ~~ _ **

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

The silence falling over the bar was instantaneous, as the seventh and last sheep spoke up with a sound that could put several minor demons to shame. Looking around the table for a bit, blinking his blank, red eyes, Darcrack, Dreamer’s Bane settled back down to finish the last of his grass. The crowd dispersed back to their tables, and the rest of the sheep settled as well. Killer fell into a doze against Horace’s side, and he shifted his many legs to accommodate her.

“Thanks, Darcrack,” Lolonja said eventually, and he met her eyes and flicked his ears dismissively.

She knew what he meant.

There was no reason to make such a fuss of things.

Their Master loved them. It was that simple. And they loved each other, and that was one thing they would never announce to the crowd at Midway, because that was just how it was.

Love was never meant to be loud.


	29. Running for home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the early years, Gravity Falls was proud of its status as a sanctuary more than anything else.

They smell like a week on the road, and they look like more. Their clothes are dirty and slightly torn, the man carries a backpack, which has the distinctive air a backpack has when it is filled with everything someone owns, their steps are heavy, and their eyes are guarded.

The bell at the door gives a pling as they enter, the three of them. The bell is a new addition, just a little something Susan had installed when she had to replace the door last week anyways. (Hopefully the Corduroy patriarch would keep his “meetings” with the manotaurs outside the diner from now on.) It is not a loud sound, but it draws the attention of everyone present, and the little family freezes.

It lasts only for a second before people go back to their food and drink. The family exchanges nervous glances with only a sliver of hope in them, and they are too hungry and too tired to leave, so they find a table.

The room fills with whispering and muttered conversation, and they listen with half an ear each as they discuss where to go from here, just in case things take a bad turn. They are worried, a result of a long time without anything to trust, but the woman in the apron smiles at them and says their first meal is on the house, and their gratefulness outweighs their suspicion.

Around them, the population of Gravity Falls is discussing their future with far more certainty than they are.

“Where d’you think they come from?”

“Dunno. Far, by the look of it.”

“Think anyone can take them?”

“Not me. I’ve got an opening if they want work, but my house is full.”

“I have a small room if they’ll take it.”

“Look like they’re being hunted.”

“Yeah, think they’re dangerous?”

“Eh, Pines kids are gonna talk to them. They’ll let us know one way or another.”

They are halfway through their second helping of mediocre, (but filling and _free_ ) homemade dinner when a girl sits down with them.

She looks like she might be late teens, though her bright sweater and equally bright smile makes her seem younger. Something about the way she holds herself dulls their reflexive defensiveness, yet she still gives the impression that there is more to her than it seems. The paradox is not lost on them.

“Hi,” she says, “My name is Mabel Pines. I’m the welcoming committee.”

Mabel listens as they introduce themselves and she does not ask for surnames when they are not given. She does not ask for their relations either, though they are too close in age to be parents and child, yet none of them act like just friends nor as siblings. She asks about their preferences in living arrangements, she asks for their ages and job qualifications, and then she tells them where they can sleep tonight, and that they are welcome to stay.

She makes sure to let them know there is no demand, that no one is forcing them to stay. She notices their jumpiness and speaks a little softer than she usually would, but she does not intend to coddle them, or lie to them, so when the youngest woman relaxes enough to ask, “You don’t think we might be dangerous, then?” she smiles.

“Oh, I know that,” she says. “I don’t think you look dangerous, but you can never know, right? Dangerous people come here all the time. It’s why I came to talk to you first. Me and my brother are pretty good at figuring out this stuff.”

They look around for a confused second or two as she mentions her brother, and behind her, Dipper snickers.

“And you would throw us out if you thought we were?” the oldest woman asks.

Mabel laughs at that before she can stop herself.

“Oh no,” she says. “I said dangerous people come here, I never said they leave.”

The paradoxical aura she gives off lets them laugh with her, if only a little. At least now they know why she never looked defenseless.

They relax, and Mabel goes back to her own table, humming something enthusiastically yet tunelessly. The bell plings again as more guests enter and give them little more than a glance. Susan brings them more food. They are still not sure whether they believe it, but they take it for now. Any hope is better than none.

They have finished eating, and feel slightly guilty for taking this much for free, when the sounds of slamming car doors and dogs reach them. Some seconds later, the bell plings and the door opens to reveal a terrifyingly familiar band of hunters. The chains to the dogs’ collars are drawn taut, but the men holding them are big enough to keep them still. There are guns, and big knives and bigger muscles, and their eyes search the diner before they find the little family.

Before they can take a step further, Susan practically materializes in front of them with a mug of coffee in one hand.

“Are you boys here for a cup?” she asks with a cheerfulness no one believes.

“We’re not here for coffee, woman, we’re hunting” the biggest of the men says.

“Then I think you should go somewhere else,” she says.

The man grunts at her and brushes her aside, but now someone else stands in his way.

She is tall, and not just for a woman. Her bright red hair reaches her lower back and her face has more freckles than a leopard has spots. She wears flannel and denim, and her hand rests on the axe hanging from her belt in a way that betrays a readiness to draw. Anyone who knows a thing about hunters knows her name. Wendy Corduroy happens to be the best hunter there is.

The little family discreetly packs their things and hopes their situation did not just worsen considerably, though a quick smile and small wave from Mabel across the room does give them hope. The hunters at the door look confused.

“There isn’t anything here for you to hunt, dude,” Wendy says.

“Oh yeah?” the man says, and he nods towards the family. “Then what’re they?”

Wendy glances in their direction even though they all know she already knows they are there.

“People?” she says. “I like to think I can tell the difference between people and monsters. Can you?”

“Those aren’t people,” the man says. “They’re filthy beasts, and we’ve been on their trail across half the state, we’re not about to lose ‘em now.”

“Or maybe you just don’t have the balls to admit you’re a murderer,” she says nonchalantly.

The band goes dead silent. One of them lets out something like a growl. Several reaches for their guns. The dogs are given a bit more slack. The man in front of Wendy nearly snarls at her.

“I don’t care who you are,” he says. “No one speaks to me like that, and you can’t take on all of us at once.”

Wendy smiles a little wider.

“Shame we won’t find out if that’s true,” she says, “’cause I’m not alone,” and Mabel comes up beside her, holding a bat studded with nails and barbed wire.

Even with the bat, the five-foot girl would not be too impressive a sight, but the dogs stop pulling at their chains as she approaches. In fact, they do their best to hide behind their owners, and even this band of hunters has enough brains to tell how bad a sign that is.

“This is Gravity Falls,” she says, and her voice is made of nothing quite as soft as steel. “You leave now, or you never leave at all.”

“Oy, oy, wait,” one of the hunters in the back says, “that would definitely get you in trouble.”

“I don’t know,” Wendy smiles. “Would anyone report us if these guys never come home?” she asks the room, and not a single person says a word.

The hunters leave.

Mabel has a quick chat with her brother, just to make sure they never hurt anyone else, one way or another.

Wendy gets a free cup of coffee for the inconvenience. After all, she is supposed to be off work when she is at home.

The little family looks at each other over the table. They hold each other’s hands, and they look out the window and think, ‘yeah, we could live with this.’


	30. Cleaning out the Headwear

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There were some HCs about Alcor's hat. I'm sorry I can't link to them, I think they're buried. Anyways, look at me trying to be funny.

It started as your normal, everyday summoning. Not that Sarah summoned demons very often. Not even this particular demon. Sure, she was a Pines, and yes, she was perhaps overly interested in her family’s history, but for the most part she could track down the stories and trivia on her own. It was only sometimes, when she ran into an especially infuriating snag in her research, or when she had a theory she really just needed confirmed, that she drew up a circle and called on the family patron.

Alcor was always so nice about it. He seemed happy just to have contact with another family member, and often gave her every answer she wanted for only a few pastries and a bag or two of candy. David never minded baking things for that purpose, as he already regularly made sacrifices at the temple of the Dreamers’ Star. This was just a little more direct.

Even with the family connection, Sarah felt as if Alcor often undercharged her. She suspected it had something to do with the chaos that seemed to follow them around wherever they went.

Either way, this was supposed to be just another one of those summonings. She was trying to track the whereabouts of a particular family heirloom through the generations, only to find it disappearing somewhere around the year 200 AT. She had a few suspicions, and so she called on Alcor, and sure enough, it was currently in his possession. He mentioned he could give it to her for the right price, she agreed, and then… then.

“I’m sure it’s in here _s̡o͏̶m̢͢͝e̵̸͡where_ ,” he said, with his hand further down his hat than physics said was possible.

Sarah looked on with an expression that was half incredulous, half fascinated.

“When was the last time you cleaned that thing out?” she asked, and he froze.

“I… don’t… know,” he said, peering down into the depths of his hat.

He hummed thoughtfully, ran his fingers across the brim, and, without further ado, upended it.

Something like a mountain of candy wrappers fell out. Some of them Sarah recognized, some she thought might belong to things that went off the market decades ago, and some were perfectly unfamiliar to her.

They both stared at the pile for a few seconds before it started crawling away. Alcor stepped on it, and it fell apart, revealing… more candy wrappers.

“Er…” Sarah said.

“Things… tend to come alive if I leave them in here too long,” Alcor answered.

“Candy wrappers, though?”

“I guess I do have a habit of leaving those in there. It must have started assimilating them.”

“Is there anything else in there?”

“Probably…”

He put his hand back into the hat as far as it would go and rifled around a little. Then he ripped it out with a curse as if something had bitten him. Following the hand, a _something_ that was white and pink twisted flesh and feathers, with too many wings and far too many eyes, squeezed out of the hat and flapped with surprising speed out the window.

“What the fuck was that!” Sarah asked from the floor, where she ended up in her hurry to get away from the flapping thing.

“Ah shit,” Alcor said, “I’d forgotten about those.”

“Those?” She asked, slightly hysterical. “I’m pretty sure that was just one thing.”

“Well yeah, but it used to be a bunch of doves, which I, kind of, forgot to take out. Um. Note to self, do not put living things in here.”

She stared at him as she got back to his feet and he shrugged sheepishly.

“On the upside, there probably isn’t much else living in here. I think that thing ate most of them.”

“Oh perfect,” Sarah choked out.

He put his hand back down the hat, and for the next five minutes or so, he pulled out an impressive pile of trash, some of which did indeed look as if it had been chewed on. He only hesitated when his hand closed around something that looked a lot like a human femur. His eyes flickered to Sarah’s.

“Okay,” he said. “I honestly don’t know where this comes from.”

She did not feel reassured. After a few more awkward moments, he gently placed the bleached-white bone on the floor beside the trash pile and went back to looking through the hat.

Among the next few things he pulled out were two books Sarah was pretty sure had been banned for centuries, on account of killing people, several sets of crayons, a miniature car that she suspected was somehow a normal car, a large, empty picture frame, and a gorgeous red dress. The femur was joined by several more bones, including three ribs and half a skull.

Around the time he grabbed the other half of the skull, he got a little more systematic, pulling out bone after bone until he had what appeared to be a whole human skeleton. Then he scratched his head a little.

“Uh,” he said. “I still don’t know how this got in here.”

Sarah was feeling a little too queasy to answer. She noticed the bones did not looked chewed on, but she was not sure whether that was a good thing or not.

She kept a wary eye on the pile of bones, half expecting it to get up and walk away, and did therefore miss the suitcases full of outdated money and the large stash of uneaten candy. She did not miss the folder of Twin Souls fanfiction. She wisely decided not to say anything.

It took about half an hour before the hat was emptied completely. By the time Alcor patted it on the top a few times and nothing else fell out, Sarah felt she had seen more than any living human had the right to see. It took her a few seconds to realize he was holding out the item she had been promised for her to take.

Once their deal was finalized, he snapped his fingers and the large pile of trash disappeared in thin air. Then he waved most of the other assorted… things back into his hat and left.

Sarah sat down heavily on the couch. Then she got up to make sure Skitz was really indoors and not somewhere he might get eaten by an amalgam of ex-doves. Then she sat back down and tried to figure out how to explain the skeleton on the floor to David.


	31. Little mother, old friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is kind of an independent sequel to MaryPSue's "What Friends Are For", which is terribly angsty but incredibly good, and I needed to feel better after reading it. So here you go.

How long did he sit there, curled around himself, before the sound of careful hooves drew his attention?

Maybe hours, maybe days, time was never so consistent in the mindscape.

She stopped beside him and nudged him softly, and he looked up at her.

Lolonja was never a very big sheep, though she had grown a bit since that first time they met. Over the centuries, she became somewhat of a mother to the Flock, caring for them when they were scared or hurt, and chewing them out if they became too reckless, and every so often, just slightly, she would mother him too.

He appreciated it.

They sat there in silence for a while, and he pulled a hand slowly through her wool and tried not to look too worried, but she noticed. Of course she noticed.

“Tell me?” she asked, and he met her eyes.

It struck him then, something he almost never thought about, that the little black sheep was in fact older than him. She belonged to Bill for hundreds of years before she belonged to him, and now that seemed relevant again.

“I-” he started, without knowing where to take the sentence.

“Master?”

He sighed, and uncurled a little from himself.

“What would you do if Bill ever came back?” he asked.

She looked confused, and shifted her legs a little before answering.

“I imagine you would kill him if he did.”

The answer sounded halfway like a question, and he sighed again.

“Tell me,” she repeated, and he did.

He told her about Ian, about their fragile understanding atop an ocean of too much hurt, too much damage. He told her about the thing in Nevada, about the ancient government facility that still stood ready to decimate the world, and he slipped into a tangent about Henry that made him have to stop and catch his breath through the tears before he told her about the circles, and the Name, and Bill.

He reluctantly told her about how he had nearly murdered his Mizar’s- Mira’s boyfriend, just because of who he used to be, and it was all his fault everything was fucked now. If only he had looked closer, been less stubborn, tried to explain more, none of this would have happened to begin with, and they were both hurting now and there was nothing he could do.

She kept quiet as he spoke, staying as a warm and wooly weight at his side. When he finished, she hummed a thoughtful note.

“I would like to meet him, I think,” she said, and his hand in her wool clenched in a pang of irrational fear.

“Why?” he asked.

He tried to keep his voice level, tried to shake off and hide the momentary panic, but she knew him too well to be fooled. She smiled at him, a smile full of sharp and jagged teeth that was reassuring nonetheless.

“Curiosity,” she said. “I want to see what he is like, is all.”

‘To make sure you have nothing to worry about,’ she did not say, but he heard it, and when he could not find the appropriate words to thank her, he put his arms and wings around her in an embrace and buried his face in her wool in a mimicry of their first encounter, and he relearned how to breathe.

\---

Ian did not expect to find his apartment full of red-eyed sheep.

They were everywhere. On the floor, on the couch, on every chair. One even occupied his girlfriend’s lap, which at least told him they were not there to kill anyone. Most of them were gathered around the TV, watching a mindless reality show, and not sparing him much more than a glance. At least they moved aside easily enough when he wanted to pass.

The strangest thing might be how little he reacted to them.

It was, he figured, a little like the point in a cartoon when something happens that is so silly and out of left field you accept it without question, because there is no other way to react. This is just how the world is now, do not question it.

The sheep taking up half the couch gracefully moved aside when he approached, letting him sit down. Mira smiled at him from the other half of the couch.

“So, uh,” he said, gesturing vaguely towards the TV screen, “what are we watching?”

“So You Think You Can Scuba Dive,” Mira answered as the contestants on the screen did indeed don scuba gear.

“Okay,” he said. “Why?”

“The Flock likes reality shows,” she said.

“Oh, okay,” he said.

They sat there in silence for a while and watched as the red team steadily pulled ahead of the blue team on the screen. The sheep watched with the focus of someone who has money riding on the outcome. Ian tried to wind up his mind again, tried to get back on track with reality, but all he managed was to notice a smaller sheep at the side of the couch watching him instead of the show.

He met its bright red and far too intelligent eyes, and then he had a hard time looking away. After about five seconds of mutual staring, the sheep got up, jumped over Mira onto the couch and walked up to put its face as close to Ian’s as possible, all without breaking eye contact. Sheep were not supposed to be that nimble.

“Uh…” he said as he leaned back far enough that the sheep had to rest its forelegs on his chest to stay close.

It stared into his eyes for a few more seconds, and he got the feeling that it looked further than the surface of his irises. For the duration of those seconds, trapped by the stare of a pair of eyes that were more human than they should be, he felt almost appraised. He felt like a precious stone under a loupe, being searched for every possible impurity or fault, and just as he started to worry about what the sheep would do when it found his considerable collection of darkness, it was over.

The sheep blinked, and snorted, and lay down all over his lap, and then it said, in a voice that would be pleasantly feminine if not for the undertones of bleating and radio static, “Y̶o͝u͢ w͘òrr͞y͟ ̨tóo ͏m͠uch̷.”

“Uh, what?” was Ian’s reply, which, considering he was just hit with such a thing as a talking demonic sheep in his lap, was remarkably verbose.

It- she?- looked up at him with an annoyed expression he suspected hid fondness of some sort.

“I̧ ̸don’t̨ carȩ ͜w̴ha͡t̨ ̸y̧oų ̷r͠e͝m͠ember͠,” she said, and he was not surprised that that was why she was there, because he suspected that of everyone these days, “Yo͞u ̢a̸r̸e͝ h̴u͏mán,” she said, “Y͡o͝u̧ ̕ar̀e nǫ ̛thr̨e̡at t͟o a̧nỳone.̵”

“How can you know that?” he challenged almost automatically.

She grinned then, a grin full of teeth he did not want this close to anything he liked, and for a moment she looked nothing like a sheep.

“In̷ m͞y̶ ̛li͘fe ̴I̕ hàve s̀e̢rv́ed t́w̧o͟ d͟e̡mon̨s an͞d̨ v̨isit͡e̵d m̕ore ͡m̛i̵n̢ds t͟hąn you ͠ḩave̴ ̴seen d̷a͏ys. I b̶él͏i̷e̸ve̴ I ̧c͠àn̡ re͝co͘gn̡i͠z͝e a̴ huma̢n ̶m̀ìńd ͜w͝heǹ ͘I͠ s͏ee̛ o̸n̨e.”

“Human doesn’t necessarily mean not a threat,” he said.

She closed her smile, turned it into something more friendly, and her expression was most definitely fond, now.

“We h̶a͘ve ̛not̷ śt͝ayed͢ ͟al͡iv͟e this͞ ́l̸o̢ng̀ ̛b̕y̷ ͘u̵n̛de̡r͞e͡stimat̵ing a͝n͘yone,” she said, and put her head down on the armrest and looked back at the screen. “Be͠si͞d͞eş,” she added, “t͘he ͡f̨a̸c̸t͟ th͜at̴ you͡ ͡are ͞wo͝rry͞i̸n̕g a͏b͜òu̢t tha̷t, alr͟e͝ad̀y̧ ͝p̶r̷óves ͢th̡at ̸y̷o͠u ͢a͜re̡ n̕ot him.”

“And you would know?” he asked.

“I͢ ͡woul̨d̡ ̕k͏no̴w̷,” she answered.

And he would have argued, he would, but her voice resonated with something in his mind, a sliver of an echo of a disorienting memory that never belonged to him, and it hit him for a moment that yes, she really would.

On the screen, the blue team pulled off a victory in a clearly staged dramatic turnabout, and some of the sheep started complaining while others smiled smugly.

Ian had one hand on the surprisingly soothing oil-slick wool of the weight in his lap, and Mira caught his other hand and squeezed it.

His life would make for one deranged cartoon.

Ah well.

That was how he liked them.


	32. Car Trouble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Rainbow Basher](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7167431/chapters/16270253) meets [the Car](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6457522). This was never meant to end well.

“So, that’s 21 for me, 18 for Eddy, 20 for Thomas and 5 for Brad, making me the winner,” Maria summarized.

Brad groaned from the back seat.

“Ugh, I knew I should’ve picked a different colour.”

Thomas ignored his friends easily. He was more than happy with second place in a car-counting contest with Maria, especially since he was the driver and had to keep an eye on the road, and there were harder things to zone out than Brad’s sulking.

He had to say, once he got used to the garish colour and slightly volatile personality, the Rainbow Basher ran like a dream. The millennia-old steering was simple enough to get, the engine purred like a cat, and it was almost as if she understood where he wanted to go. They had been on the road for a while, though, and he was getting tired.

A sign caught his eye as they drove past.

“Hey,” he said, “pit stop up ahead. Who’s hungry?”

There was a chorus of “I am!”s from the passengers, but after five hours on the road, he expected nothing less.

Everyone piled out of the truck the second Thomas pulled up to the only building they had seen for miles. They stretched their legs, popped their backs, and strolled into the shop in search of fast food and something to drink.

Half an hour later, Thomas was on his fourth cheap hot dog, Brad was in the bathroom, and Maria and Eduardo were discussing the pros and cons of different candy bars. Then a sound like a giant, rampaging, zombified rhino hit their ears.

The roar grew to deafening proportions, coming from somewhere outside the doors, and then it stopped, leaving an echoing silence.

A few seconds later, the bell on the door dinged.

The girl who entered was a little thing, top of her blonde, done-up hair reaching Thomas’ shoulder at most, but she looked like any other driver would after hours on the road. She shrugged sheepishly at the people staring at her and walked over to look at the bottles of wine along one wall, and conversation slowly started up again.

Brad finished up in the bathroom, and the four of them walked out the door, and stopped dead.

There was another car next to the Rainbow Basher, though calling it a car might be too generous. It looked about twice her age, which was impossible, considering electricity had yet to be discovered back then. It looked like a collection of twisted and rusting metal in the vague shape of a car, smashed together with sledgehammers and glued into place by hundreds of layers of different coloured paint. It looked like someone had tried to paint it blue sometime in the past year. Adding to this, it was covered in charms, runes, sigils and hexes. It did not look like something that had ever been capable of driving, and yet, the engine was running.

The group did not stop to stare because of any of this. They did because, not only was the engine running at the volume of a whole construction crew, the monstrosity of a car was moving, and it did so on its own.

The… car, was slowly closing in on the Basher, sidling up in a way that reminded Maria about how her family dog would walk right up beside her and silently beg for ear scritches. The Basher did not react, in much the same way a cat does not react to something approaching if it thinks what is approaching is beneath it. She ignored it completely. Stayed as still as any other car. Kept cool as ice… until the ragged car manoeuvred itself within a foot of her, and she slammed her door open, smashing what was left of its side mirror.

The car jumped back, revving its engine with a screeching roar and putting some distance between them. Thomas almost took a breath in relief before he recognized it as ramming distance.

Just then, a small, blonde blur shot past him, shouting, “No! Bad car!” He had only a split second to realize what was going to happen and grab her before the car accelerated again.

It shot head-on towards the Basher with a frankly absurd speed, making too much noise for anyone to hear anything, but the Basher was a step ahead of it. She moved too, accelerating from 0 into a tire-scorching 180° turn just as it passed her, and faced it before it could even think of changing direction again. She impacted without hesitation and it screeched a yowl, steam and smoke billowing from beneath its hood.

The people present gaped in confusion and shock as the cars separated and started circling each other, neither eager to make the next move.

“So,” Thomas asked the girl he still had a tight grip on, “that your car?”

“Yeah.” She had stopped struggling now, so he let go. “That yours?”

“Yup.”

They watched the cars sizing each other up for a bit more before she spoke up again.

“What does it run on?”

“Uhh…” Thomas hesitated before he guessed that this girl was not likely to care overly much. “Mostly demonic energy I think. Also, she prefers ‘she’. Yours?”

“No clue. I found it hiding out in my uncle’s garage one day; dunno where it came from. It gets far on roadkill and good wine, though, and I’m 50% sure it’s undead. Oh, and I don’t think it cares about pronouns much.”

“I see,” Thomas said. “I’m Thomas, by the way.”

“Elisha,” she answered.

In the parking lot, Elisha’s car turned to ramming speed again, missing the Basher by a hair and a heartbeat, and reducing a lamppost to shrapnel. Elisha flinched in concern, but the car just swung around for another attack. This time it bounced of the Basher’s wards, barely leaving a scratch on her.

“We gotta stop them somehow!”

“Are you sure?” Thomas said. “It’s not like that thing hasn’t survived a crash or twelve before.”

“Doesn’t mean it deserves another!”

“Oh, alright then,” he said.

Honestly, he would have agreed sooner if he could come up with some way to control two rampaging cars.

“Well, Maria ran off to call Tyrone,” Brad said.

Elisha gave a questioning look, and Thomas explained.

“Friend of ours. He might be able to help.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Eduardo said. “Question is whether he’ll want to”

In the parking lot, the Rainbow Basher chased the wreck of a zombie car around in a circle, and Thomas calculated the odds of that to be roughly negative.

Of course, that was the moment Tyrone chose to walk around the corner. He got one look at the feral cars, and broke out in the most gleeful grin Thomas had seen on him in a very long time. In fact, he looked a little as if Christmas had come early. It was not a reassuring smile.

“Are you kidding me?” he said, clearly on the verge of hysterical laughter.

“What, so this _isn’t_ your fault?”

“My- Brad! Stop blaming everything on me.”

Brad gestured helplessly at the parking lot.

“We have two sentient cars, one of which might or might not be a zombie, trying to kill each other for no good reason. Who else are we going to blame?”

“Oh, it’s definitely undead alright. Whether or not it’s a zombie is up to your definition of it.”

“Wait,” Elisha said, confused, “you know my car?”

“Sure I- Hey!” he said, cutting off his friends, “just because I know it doesn’t mean it was my fault, okay?”

“Tyrone…” Thomas said.

“Yeah?”

Thomas sighed. They were getting nowhere with this.

“Just tell us how to stop them.”

Tyrone looked at him for a second before he grinned again.

“Yeah, alright. Just get in between them, really. The Basher would never hit someone she likes, and the Car is too loyal and too scared of me to even think of it.”

Thomas had to blink a few times over the fact that Tyrone just pronounced capital letters, but Elisha was already running and he felt he had to follow her.

For one heart-stopping moment, he was sure they would both end up as roadkill, but then both cars screeched to a stop on either side of them. He could feel Elisha give a sigh of relief at his back, echoing himself. Both cars’ engines were still running at a growl, but at least they stopped.

He dared glance away from the car facing him just long enough to see the others approaching. The Car did indeed back up slightly at the sight of Tyrone.

“So it really is scared of you, huh?”

“Hm, yeah,” Tyrone said. “It’s got a stronger survival instinct than I’ve ever seen on anything else; though I guess it would need it. It did survive David and Sarah, after all.”

Thomas had no idea who David and Sarah were, but considering the fact that the moment Tyrone mentioned them was the same moment he learned that a car could _flinch_ , he figured he might not want to know.

“Okay,” Elisha said, pinning Tyrone with a glare. “Who are you, how do you know my car, and why are they acting like this?”

He smirked at her. Then he held up three fingers and started counting them off.

“Well, I’m not gonna answer the first one, for the second, I knew its original owners, as for the third… You might have noticed your car is a little desperate for love, for lack of a better word. You might also have noticed it’s quick to defend itself. On the other side, the Rainbow Basher is reasonably arrogant. She tends to think of herself as better than every other car, which admittedly she kind of is. This only becomes a problem if the other cars actually tries to interact with her. She was a disaster to be around back when AIs for cars were in fashion.”

She regarded him through narrowed eyes for a bit before she glanced over at Thomas, who shrugged and nodded. She looked over at the Basher, ran her eyes over the other people present, and then walked to the driver’s side of her car without taking her eyes off Tyrone.

“Okaaay,” she said, “I’ll just… go, then. If you don’t mind.”

“Have a nice trip!” Tyrone said with a cheerful grin.

“Try not to crash,” Thomas added.

“Don’t be silly,” she answered as she got in and fumbled with the keys. “We never crash.”

As the deafening roar of the Car disappeared in the distance, Thomas raised an eyebrow in Tyrone’s direction.

“What? I said it wasn’t my fault, didn’t I?”

Yeah, right.

As if anyone would ever believe that.


	33. The best day of your life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working on this for quite a while now. Nice to have it finished.

Pain racked his body as he sat down on the floor, and he had to hold his breath for a few moments, waiting for it to end. When it had receded back to the normal, constant, but manageable level, he reached out for the bag Aron had smuggled in earlier. It had been easy to hide it from the hospital staff. Checking up on him was just routine for them now, he had stayed there so long and there was so little they could do for him.

Carefully opening the bag, he pulled out the piece of cloth with a summoning circle drawn on it. He would have drawn it himself, but just imagining crawling around on all fours, trying to set a mark on the linoleum… He tried not to breathe too deeply while laying out the cloth and placing the candles. He had no rodents to kill, but Aron had gotten his hands on a couple big cockroaches, and he could only hope that would be enough. It was worth a shot, anyways. He lit the candles, killed the bugs and put them in the circle, and read out the incantation from a note, and the room went dark.

The light from the candles turned blue and eerie, and the shadows around them seemed to shift, even as they stood still. Moments later, the pressure of an overwhelming presence entered the room, and the demon showed himself.

“W̜͓̱͚̻̥̼̕H̹̩̪̤̞̞͕͍͜O̞̥̟͍͚̜̼͡ ̵̡͕̮D͚̞͙̳̣͖͠A̹̞̳̳̳̖͢R̦̱̰͚͘͡Ȩ͏̩̣̣͙͕̤̣̞̠̀S̡̲̬̱͎̭̀ ̸͍̟̭̩͕̼͖̫͖͟͠S̡̠̜̹̘̻̱͚̟͢͡Ų̴̱̤̹M̡̝̪͔̦͢Ḿ͔͕O͍̻̘̠̫̫̲̤͜ͅN̵̦̘̞̠̦͕͟ ͘҉̛̲̙͖̬͕̳A̯̬̳͚Ļ̮̣͓̜C̨̪̩̀͠O̸̲̙̰̪͘R͙͙̘̜̹͖̼̤͉͝͞ ̸̛̤̗̜̝̹͎͙ͅT̳̰͕̮͎̤̲͎͔͟H̞̭͓͍̲̠̥̩͘͘͞E̦̹͍͎͜͝ͅ ̷̮͚͖D̗͕̝̙̺ͅR̵̡̧͚̣͔͖E̸̢̡̲̭̹͓A̞̞͉͜͠M̩̲̜̣͢B̶̧̗̦̹͓È̳̼̞̪N̷̸̜͕͎̰̟̙̟͘D̢̥̦͙́È̝̭͔͍͈͈͔̮R̸̜̼?̳̩̭̺̲͡”

“It’s me. It’s Nike,” he said, and tried not to shake too hard.

The demon looked him over with unblinking eyes, and he had to remind himself he had nothing left to fear. Nike gestured to himself.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, but I’m dying. Cancer. Kind of everywhere. They gave me two months, but it- it hurts. So much.”

Almost to demonstrate his point, another stab of pain ran up his spine and through his lungs. The demon waited patiently for him to get his breath back.

“How much-” he swallowed, tried again. “How much would I have to pay to cure me? To get to live as if I had never been sick?”

The demon regarded him, seemed to think it over, and the look in his eyes seemed softer somehow.

“N͡o͝t̷h̢͜͡i͞͝ng ̢l̷͜eśs͡ ͢͠͏t̸͝h͏a͜ǹ̕͞ y̨ou͞r̕͟͞ ̵̷s͡o̴̶u̡l̷̡͡,” he said, and he sounded almost… apologetic?

“Oh,” Nike said, and tried to take a breath. “I was afraid of that. Well, I’m not giving you that.”

There was silence for a minute as Nike tried to think, tried to find another way, but no, there was no other way, was there? He sighed.

“How much for a painless death?”

Alcor’s eyes were definitely softer now, filled with a sympathy Nike had seen too much of the last year, but somehow more sincere. His voice was softer too.

“Gi͏ve͞n I ge͟t̵ the l͠ife ̡y̷ou̵ ͢w̨ould͟ ha͠v̴e̛ pot͜e͘nt͢i͘a͝lly l̡i͜ve̷d,̵ I̛ cou͢l̵d͝ ̷ǵiv̡e͠ yo͠u ҉th̢at͠ f̧o̷r ̡fr͟ee.̸”

Nike sighed again, and nodded, but after a brief pause, Alcor continued.

“Bu̴t le̛t͡ ̢me h͢a҉ve yoúr ͜b̷ody҉ once͢ y͡o͠u’r̵e͢ ͏d̸one w҉ith̢ ͝it̛,́ an̵d̴ I’͜l͏l gi̛ve͡ ̨y͢ǫu ̵tw̕ent͏y̢ fo̸ur̛ ̷hour҉s, ̢and I͢’̕l̷l ͠m̧ake t͞h͟em ̨ţhe b҉est͝ you’ve e҉v̧er͜ ͝h͟a͝d̸.́” He reached out a hand and only licked his lips a little. “W̨h͝a͠t do͝ ͝yo̧u̶ ҉s̀ay̸? Make̸ t̀h͘e ̸l̨ast̕ ͜d̨ay͠ o̧f̶ y̨ou͞r͝ life ҉thȩ ̢bes̸t̸ d͞ay͘ ̧o̶f y̡o͠u̧r͞ ̵li̛fe͢?̧”

Nike thought that through for a bit. There was really no question about what the demon wanted his body for, but then again, why should he care?

“That’s the best offer I’m likely to get, isn’t it?” He took another breath and took the demon’s hand. “Deal.”

The instant blue fire bloomed over their hands, the pain melted away from Nike’s body. He gasped in surprise, and for the first time in a long time, he could breathe properly. He sank down to lie on the floor and just breathe for a while, just to feel his body again, just to feel like himself.

“Ho͢w͢’r̶é y̵ou̧ fęe̷ling?” Alcor asked.

“Amazing,” Nike answered. “Amazing, and… tired. So tired. I haven’t really slept in so long.”

“Then ͞sleep. Y̶o͞u ha̧ve a b̀iģ ͞d̸a̕y ͢to lòok͡ for͜ward t͏o҉, ͝a͏nd y͞o̴ư'̶l̡l w͡ant̶ ̡t̛o͏ ̵be ͠awa̸k͠e͞ for i͘t.̧”

Nike sat up and eyed the demon smiling at him.

“You’re not gonna make me sleep through the full twenty four hours, are you?”

“N̷ah,” Alcor grinned at him, “I҉ ͡p͝romis͏e̴d yo͟u ̨t̢he̶ ̸be͡st̵ ͠da̕y͟ ̨o̕f yo̵ur͟ ĺi͝f͠e͝,͢ ̀án̛d͜ y͠o̧u’̕r̵ȩ ͘g͟oinǵ ̷t̶ơ ge͞t it͝.͜ N͝ow͝ ͝sl̨e̸e̴p̶. ̷I’̴l͠l͝ b̨e hér͝e̶ ̨w̢h҉en͟ you ͝wake͟ ̵up.”

With that, Nike went to bed, and within ten minutes, he was sleeping, dreaming of something bright and green, populated by a flock of small, white, happy things.

\---

It was the best morning he could ever remember having. The remnants of the dream slowly faded from his mind, but it left behind an air of high spirits. The morning sun only barely peeked in the window, and he stretched his arms above his head without a single sting of unnatural pain to hinder him.

Sitting up, the first thing he laid his eyes on was the unfamiliar man sitting in the chair by his bed, reading a book. The second thing was the circle on the floor, and last night’s memories hit him all at once.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m going to die today.”

The man, who was definitely not actually a man, looked up from his book and smiled.

“Well,” he said, “then you wouldn’t want to spend it sitting around here, would you?”

“No,” said Nike. “How long’ve I got left, anyways?”

“You slept almost seven hours, so seventeen, just about. You’re not going to ask about that a lot, are you? Because that might put a bit of a damper on everything.”

Nike had to agree with that. He stood up, and looked down at the white hospital gown he had been wearing for far too long already.

“I’m going to need some better clothes,” he said.

Alcor threw something onto the bed, and Nike recognized his favourite set of clothes, taken directly from his closet at home. Even a T-shirt he was sure his mum had thrown out years ago.

“So, what do I call you?” he asked, while pulling the T-shirt over his head.

“Eh,” Alcor answered, “I tend to go by Tyrone in public, but if you want to use something else, I don’t really care.”

“No, no. Tyrone is fine.”

Nothing else was said before Nike had finished dressing, and almost felt like a human again. It was, so nice.

“So?” Alcor asked. “Where do you want to go first?”

Nike looked out the window, watching as the sun slowly rose past the horizon.

“Somewhere outside,” he said. “Somewhere with sun. I don’t really care where.”

“Alright then,” Alcor said, and grabbed his hand, and suddenly they were standing on grass.

The sky was clear and the sun was bright. There were trees in the distance, a lake somewhere on the right, and there were people walking around all over. Nike looked up, closed his eyes and let the sun wash over him, let the wind bring the sounds of people past him. This was how life was supposed to be.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Central Park, New York,” Alcor answered.

Nike took a deep breath and let it out again, smelling the grass and the trees, and maybe the city if he concentrated.

“Oh,” he said. “New York, huh? Say… if I send a letter to my mum from here, it’ll take, like, three days to get to her?”

“Two, actually.”

“Okay, cool. I’ve always kinda wanted to see this city.”

They walked together through the park, taking their time. Or, well, Nike took his time. Alcor just walked when he walked, and stopped whenever he stopped to look at the life around him. Once, Nike started laughing, because he caught himself apologizing to his companion for being so whimsical.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alcor grinned back. “I’m at your service.”

“What, completely?”

“Eh, within reason. I won’t kill anyone for you, even if you ask nicely, but I’m here to make you happy, you know?”

Nike smiled, and decided not to think about why a very powerful demon would spend its day trying to make him happy. There was no point in thinking about the inevitable. The smile was still on his face as they exited the park and passed a corner store, and a thought struck him.

“Hey, do you think you could get me a winning lottery ticket?”

“Sure,” Alcor answered, giving him a strange look. “Why?”

“Oh, you know, I just figured I could send it to my mum, right? She doesn’t deserve to have to deal with my medical bills if they never even helped.”

Alcor looked at him for another few seconds, and then handed him a twenty.

“Go buy one,” he said. “It’ll be a winner.”

So Nike entered the corner store with a twenty dollar bill, and came out about eight million dollars richer.

“Alright,” he said, carefully folding the lottery ticket up. “Now I need a piece of paper, a pen, an envelope and a stamp.” His stomach made a noise like a dying whale. “…and breakfast. I need breakfast. Do you know any good cafés nearby?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Alcor said, and led him through the streets.

They ended up at a place hidden between two buildings, with a clear view of the sky and only a few other guests. The waitress had a nice smile and the chairs were comfortable, and Alcor procured a sheet of paper and a pen, so that Nike could write while he ordered, and Nike did his best not to think of it as a suicide note.

_Mum_ he wrote, and tried to think of the words to use.

_When you’re reading this, I’ve already left. Depending on whether Aron told you what I was planning, and whether anyone found the circle I left in my room, you probably also know how I left._

_I won’t ask you not to be sad, because there’s no way that’s going to happen, and I think I might even be a bit insulted if you weren’t, but I will ask you not to let it break you completely. You have so much left to live for. So many people to love._

_I’m sorry. I know you wanted me to hold on as long as I could, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t live like that, and I couldn’t put you through that either. I think, in the end, this is better for all of us. My last day is promising to be a good one, and I want you to know I went on my own terms, by my own choice, and painlessly. What’s done is done, don’t cry all your tears over me._

_Take care of my little brother for me. Remember to live for him too, and tell him I love him, both now, and when he’s old enough to understand and too old to remember._

_I love you_

_Nike_

He sat back and read through what he had written, then folded the paper up and put it in the envelope that lay on the table beside him.

“Do you think it’s any good?” he asked, and Alcor tilted his head.

“She’ll cry when she reads it,” he answered. “Then again, she’ll have been crying a lot that day. She’ll keep it open on her dresser for the rest of her life, until she knows it by heart. Sometimes she’ll read it anyways, just to see your handwriting. After paying off her debts she’ll set the rest of the money on an account for your brother to inherit because she won’t be able to handle the thought of using it.” He looked back up at Nike just as the food arrived. “I think it’s good.”

Nike accepted his food and tried to put all that information out of his mind. That task was made a lot easier by the fact that breakfast was the best thing he had ever tasted in his life. Now, it had been ages since the last time he had been really hungry, been able to taste anything, or eaten anything but hospital food, so he might have been biased, but it was still the best thing he had ever tasted.

After eating, and paying, and tipping the waitress generously, Nike posted his letter, and then Alcor led him on a tour through New York. A tour that was quickly expanded to include quite a few other cities.

Nike saw more places than he had ever thought he would get the chance to see, more wonders of technology and architecture than he had thought existed, and more people than he really had the capacity to understand. When he got hungry again, they went to an actual five-star restaurant in France, and the experience somehow managed to top breakfast by a big margin. Through it all, he and Alcor talked, and they talked a lot. Either the two of them had surprisingly much in common, or Alcor was indulging him, but the facts of the matter were that Nike enjoyed talking to him. He answered almost every question Nike had about anything both clearly and comprehensively, and he had something to say about everything, from architecture through movies to the ridiculous perfectness of lunch.

It was there, sitting in silence at the restaurant, that Nike remembered something he had thought would never matter.

“Hey, isn’t Comic-Con on today?”

“Yes it is,” Alcor said. “Do you want to go?”

Nike thought about it for a bit.

“I dunno… Is Comic-Con a good use of the last day of your life?”

Alcor shrugged.

“It’s your day, isn’t it? I won’t judge how you choose to spend it. Personally, I think it’s the best way you could use it, though.”

“Me and Aron were always planning to go there together some day. I wouldn’t mind fulfilling that one, at least.”

\---

Nike had never seen so many expressions on one face as he got when Aron opened the door and saw him. There was a tired kind of sadness, which turned into pure surprise, edging into shock, joy, incredulousness, and then annoyance, ending with confusion.

“Dude…” Aron said, “you said you’d call me if it worked!”

“Ah, yeah,” Nike scratched his head with a sheepish expression, “about that. Uh. It kinda… didn’t”

Aron blinked dumbly.

“Huh?”

Nike grimaced and gestured back to where Alcor stood leaning against the gate to Aron’s driveway. Alcor wiggled his fingers in greeting.

“Meet… Tyrone. He doesn’t usually look this human. He gave me a day.”

Aron looked stunned, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. He opened and closed his mouth a few times looking for words before he gave up and practically engulfed Nike in a hug.

“Dude, I’m so sorry, I- are you okay? Are you-”

“Gods, Aron, you’re crushing my ribs!”

“Right! Sorry.”

Aron let go and Nike gasped for air. He still looked concerned.

“Really dude, are you okay?”

Nike laughed and rubbed his abused ribs.

“Yes, really. I feel great. In fact, I wanted to ask if you’ll come to Comic-Con with us.”

“R- Really?”

He had such a look of utter confusion. Nike could only smile.

“ _Yes._ Really. I’ve been sight-seeing all day, I’d like to do this with you. Yeah?”

“…Let me get my stuff.”

Nike chuckled to himself and walked back to wait with Alcor as Aron scoured his mess of a room for his stuff.

“You been friends long?” Alcor asked.

“Pretty much forever,” Nike answered. “He’s the one who helped me with, well, you.”

“I know,” Alcor nodded. Then he smiled vaguely towards the house. “He’s a good friend. You should be happy you’ve had him.”

“I am.”

Aron came barrelling out of his house with his bag over one shoulder and his jacket half-on.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” he said.

“Aron,” Nike said, “if you didn’t keep me waiting, you wouldn’t be you.”

“Yeah, but… you said a day, didn’t you?”

“Mhm,” Nike said. “Twenty four hours. Or, not twenty four anymore. More like… how long’ve I got left, anyways?” he asked.

Alcor raised an eyebrow.

“You said you weren’t gonna ask about that.”

“Oh, just tell me,” Nike sighed.

“Just about ten hours,” he answered. “So, are we all ready to go?”

They nodded, he grabbed onto their hands, and then…

\---

The room was so stuffed with people there had to be quite some heavy magic involved to make sure no one crashed into them as they appeared. On first glance, Nike could see at least a dozen cosplayers. There were colourful stalls around selling the strangest of things, and the walls held banners and huge screens showing programs and ads.

It was perfect.

They ran around for quite a while, pointing out especially good, strange or funny cosplays to each other, and visiting different stalls and events. Every queue seemed to be miraculously short when they got there. Aside from knowledge about pretty much everything else, Alcor seemed to have a particularly deep knowledge of everything nerd-cultural, and he pointed out and explained more cosplays than Aron and Nike put together.

At one point, they happened upon a demonstration of a kill-bot that had been used as a prop in a popular sci-fi movie series, and somehow Alcor ended up fighting it to submission with a lightsabre. In hindsight, no one could quite remember how that had happened, or how a so-called prop had ended up with real weaponry, but they all agreed that it was a suitably epic battle.

“You know, I thought that was just a rumour,” Aron said, as they walked away from the very confused group of robotics experts. “But you really are a big nerd, aren’t you?”

Alcor waved him off.

“Pff, don’t be silly.”

“You’re a show-off, that’s what you are,” Nike said.

“Now _that_ , I’ll admit to.”

Eventually, Aron’s stomach made a noise like a dying whale, and they had to stop for some shitty convention food. Well, Aron and Alcor ate. Nike was still running on lunch, but he had ice cream and something to drink.

They had only barely started eating when a girl walked up to their table and addressed Alcor.

“Excuse me?” she said. “I’m sorry, I just… has anyone ever told you you look like Alcor the Dreambender?”

“Uh…” Alcor gaped at her. “Not… really? Thank you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and hid her face in her hands, “I didn’t mean to be rude. I- I’ll just…”

She walked away without finishing her sentence, and they barely managed to hold it until she was out of earshot before they broke out laughing.

“Did that seriously just happen?” Aron said. “You get that a lot or what?”

“Not really, no,” Alcor said. “You know, I once went to a convention like this without any disguise at all. Well, I was walking on the floor and tried not to move my wings, but nothing other than that.”

“Yeah? Did people freak out?”

“They really didn’t. In fact, I got a lot of compliments on my costume. I also got three separate people telling me I was too short to be Alcor.”

“You’re kidding me,” Nike laughed.

“I am not. I mean, what do you want from me people? High heels? This is how tall I am!”

\---

The conversation drifted into other things eventually. Aron turned out to have quite a few opinions on how to spend one’s last day.

“Alright, cities are one thing, but there are so many other things to see! The East African lightning fields, the Bottomless Waterfalls, the Brazilian jungle villages…”

“I didn’t think the caipora let humans close to their villages,” Nike said.

“Well, they don’t, but I figure _he_ can get you in,” he replied, nodding towards Alcor, who looked up with a start.

“Who, me? Er, sure, but I don’t think they’ll be very happy about it.”

“See?”

“Alright, alright,” Nike waved him on. “Was there anything else?”

“Well, I hope you’ve already gotten the most important thing out of the way.”

“The what?”

“The… Nike, gods, you’re not seriously going to die a virgin, are you?”

Nike dropped his head into his hands and groaned.

“Aron, no. We’ve talked about this. I don’t care.”

“You can’t honestly not want to try even once.”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t want it, with someone I could trust and in a situation where we both wanted and were comfortable about it, but no, I’d rather not do it at all than have my first time be out of desperation.”

“Honestly Nike, come on. _You_ think I’m right, don’t you?” he asked Alcor.

Alcor froze, and got a look on his face comparable to that of a deer seconds away from being run over.

“Um,” he said. “Uh… I’m… really not the right person to ask.”

“In that case, we’re done talking about this,” Nike declared.

Aron looked like he wanted to argue, but he realized it was a lost cause and finished his food instead, and they ventured back onto the convention floor.

They did go to see the jungle villages, once they felt they had made the most of the convention. And the lightning fields and the waterfalls and quite a few other natural wonders besides. They had dinner in a transparent bubble overlooking the coral gardens of Atlantis, and the view was almost as spectacular as the food. The commentary from Alcor was almost more fascinating than either one.

“There never used to be coral reefs down here, of course. It’s way too deep. At most, you had some imported dead ones for rich people to show off. They really started playing it up once they figured out how to grow them artificially, but it’s all for the tourists.”

Alcor had lost some of his pretence of humanity, a predatory hint to his movements matched the sharks passing by outside. Nike had no idea if this was because he was growing tired of pretending, or if it had anything to do with where they were, but no one else seemed to notice anything.

“It feels strange to think of Atlantis as a tourist town,” Aron said, “I mean, it’s the fabled capital of the maritime world.”

Alcor laughed, loud and sharp. 

“Oh no,” he said, “That’s what they want you to think. Honestly, oceanic people very much dislike land-based creatures knowing anything about them. In reality, Atlantis is on the border between the three strongest Atlantic nations. It’s purely a front for tourists. The real capitals are far better hidden.”

Between the lessons in ocean politics, the amazing food, and the view that was wonderful no matter how fake it was, dinner passed by in a flash.

It felt like too little time had passed when they once again stood on Aron’s porch.

“Dude,” he said, once again crushing Nike in a hug. “Dude, I’m gonna miss you so much, I- I don’t even know what to say…”

“Aron…”

“Better luck next time, I guess?”

Nike managed to push himself back far enough to give Aron a look of fondness and exasperation.

“Thank you. You take care of yourself, yeah? And tell mum I said not to blame you, she’s likely to be a little upset.”

“I will,” he nodded as he wiped his eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry, I think I’m crying.”

“You okay?”

Aron nodded, and Nike nodded back and turned to Alcor before he could drag it out any longer, and the world once again faded away and took his best friend with it.

\---

Alcor graciously gave him a few minutes to gather himself before he met his eyes with glowing, golden ones.

“Where to now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Nike said. “It feels like… every place we’ve been this far have been places people know about. I kinda want to see some things that not so many people know exist. Is- is that an option?”

Alcor smiled a smile filled with razor-sharp teeth.

“Yeah, I think I could manage that.”

\---

“How long?”

They were standing halfway up the side of a large mountain somewhere in Africa, listening to the song of the wind-fairies. Alcor had his wings stretched out wide to amplify the sound, and the cool air brushed over them both pleasantly. He only tilted his head at the question this time.

“I know, I know,” Nike said, “Just… tell me. Please.”

“A little over an hour,” came the quiet answer.

Nike nodded, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“I want… I want to have the best view in the world,” he said, glancing out at the world below. “I want to see the best thing you could possibly show me.”

Alcor smiled that kind, quiet smile of his, and then he nodded and reached out a hand, and then…

They were sitting on something like a blanket made out of shadows. Nike recognized their location as somewhere that had to be low orbit at least. Below them, the earth was a huge, glittering, blue and white marble, shining under the sun. The continents were green and brown, with spots of different colours. And where day gave way to night, millions of lights marked the presence of life.

The sight took his breath away, left him in awe, even after a day of the most wonderful sights in the world. Alcor stayed quiet beside him, but he dropped a small box of chocolates on the blanket-thing between them, and once Nike had his mind back enough to taste them, he had to admit they were pretty darn good. Never seemed to run out, either.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, eventually. “You really nailed this one.”

“Have I let you down yet?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Nike did not deign it with an answer. Instead, he sat back to watch the world beneath him, and eat wonderful chocolate.

After a little while, he found his eyes being drawn to the demon beside him. There was no human disguise now, just perfectly inhuman pristineness. He watched the demon he knew would kill him in less than an hour, and he thought of a day of laughter and smiles and wonder, and he could not find it in his heart to be afraid of him.

Alcor turned his head and their eyes met.

“Anything you wanted?” he asked.

“Naaaah,” Nike said, and turned his eyes back to the cloud cover below, but a thought had struck him, and now he had a hard time shaking it loose.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m… it’s not…” Nike sighed. “Kind of. It’s stupid, and weird, and I don’t think you’ll like it all that much, and it isn’t even really important. It’s not a big deal.”

Alcor raised an eyebrow at him.

“You think you’ll lose anything by asking? Now?”

Nike opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again and gave a lopsided smile.

“Point. Okay, it’s… I don’t care what Aron says, I don’t mind going out a virgin, but… Well. I _am_ going to die, and I’m sitting here with an honestly pretty attractive and actually likeable guy, and, I might be regretting the fact that I’ve never even kissed anyone, you know?”

He tried to state it as a joke, just to make it extra clear that there was no need to answer seriously, and he half-expected Alcor to reply in kind and for them to just laugh it off, but…

Earth was vast and uniquely real below them, the stars shone above like sand on one of heaven’s beaches. There was a wing around his back and a hand gently tangled in his hair, and he tasted warmth and softness and chocolate, and, well.

It was a really nice kiss.

\---

Later, they sat leaning on each other, watching the clouds flow across the sky and listening to the absolute silence of space, and Nike only had eyes for the imminent end. He tried to keep himself from asking about the time again, and fell into another question instead.

“How… how exactly are you planning to kill me?”

Alcor gave him a look before he answered.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“I’d like to know what I’m walking into, you know?” Nike said, and Alcor hummed. The sound reverberated through both of them, as close as they sat.

“I was planning to put you to sleep, then turn off your pain centres. After that you won’t really notice anything.”

Nike turned that over in his head a few times. Not bad, really.

“I still think I’d like to know.”

“Why?”

“Just curious, really.”

Once again, Alcor gave him a look before he answered. It was the kind of look that said very clearly, “I think you’re making a mistake, but hey, it’s your mistake to make.”

“I figured I’d pull your heart out of your chest and eat it,” he said, nonchalantly, and he watched very carefully for Nike’s reaction.

Nike, for his part, had been expecting something like that, and he was still slightly disturbed at the image. He also became very aware of the way Alcor’s hand rested over his chest.

“Huh,” he said, keeping his voice level. “Any particular reason for that?”

“I can’t help it, okay? It just tastes better when it’s still beating.”

At this point, Nike lost the fight against _something_ , and burst out laughing. Once he started, he had no way to stop, and it devolved through hysterics into hyperventilating, bordering on sobbing. Alcor held his arms and wings around him in an attempt at comfort.

“Shh,” he said, “I knew you shouldn’t have asked.”

“That’s… not… it,” Nike bit out through the helpless gasps. “I don’t care how it happens. I just… I don’t _want to die!_ ”

He tried not to think about the fact that he was currently clinging onto the very thing that was going to kill him. He really needed the hug.

“I’m just _twenty five._ I was supposed to finish school, get a job, get married, have a few kids. This has been the first day I’ve really lived for as long as I can remember, and I- I _can’t_. I want to _live_. I want to live so much, and this is all I get? It’s not- it’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not,” Alcor said, and his eyes were distant with old frustration. “The world isn’t _fair_ , Nike, and I know you’ve heard this a thousand times before, but that’s just how it _is._ We like to pretend that everyone is born with the same choices, the same opportunities, but that has never been true and will never be true. And it’s not _fair_ , because…” he hugged Nike closed and breathed out, and when he continued, his voice was stifled by tears, “because while you’re going to die, and that’s not fair, I _can’t_ , and I can’t help but envy you. ~~~~

I’m sorry.”

They were quiet for a while, and Nike drew hard, shuddering breaths. The arms around him were a steady comfort.

“N- no,” his voice still shook, but he was calming down somewhat. “No,” he said, “It’s not your fault. Thank you. Thank you for giving me this choice. We both know you didn’t have to.”

Alcor looked almost surprised for a second, and then he smiled.

“It’s all I could do. I think we’ve all wished for another choice at some point in our lives.”

Ah.

Right.

Again, the silence of heavy thoughts fell over them, and they sat leaning on each other. The earth spun below.

 

“Are they gonna remember me?”

 “You’ve made a lasting impression on the lives of at least fourteen people in your time.”

“I guess that’s not so bad.”

 

“Will they miss me?”

“Quite a few of them will, yes.

 

“Do you think my brother’s gonna be okay?”

“I think he’s going to be just fine.”

 

 

“How long, now?”

“Not long at all.”

 

“…I think I’d like you to put me to sleep. Think you could give me some more of those dreams? The happy ones?”

The world faded quickly enough after that, and he fell into the blissful sense of sun and grass, and oblivion.


	34. Elisha's Car

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhat of a prequel to "Car Trouble"  
> This is Elisha's story.

While she had been looking for an affordable car for some time, Elisha never expected to find it in her uncle’s garage.

In fact, her uncle’s garage was the kind of place you expected cars to disappear from, not where they randomly showed up. The door was never locked and rarely even properly closed, no matter how many times his family told him something was likely to get stolen. He just had a little too much faith in the world to do right by him. This might be why, when Elisha went out there searching for a toolbox and instead found a completely unfamiliar car, he decided to forego calling the police and simply give it to her.

“I know it’s a little beat up, but you were looking for a cheap car, weren’t you?”

“A little beat up?” Elisha nearly shrieked. “It looks like it’s been through a garbage compactor. Does it even run?”

“Well,” her uncle said, “it must’ve gotten here somehow, right?”

Against her better judgement, she climbed into the driver’s seat and looked for a key, which she found already jammed into the ignition. She had to try a few times before she managed to turn it, but when she did, the engine roared to life immediately, growling at a volume fit for a jet.

“So what d’you think!?” her uncle shouted through the open door.

“It’s definitely alive!” she shouted back.

“Want to take it for a spin!?”

“Might as well!” she said, and closed the door.

It took her about a minute to figure out the antiquated controls, but soon enough she backed slowly out of the garage.

From the look of the car, she had expected the driving to be a horrible, stopping-and-starting, lethally dangerous mess. She was very pleasantly surprised. Sure, it sounded like a horde of wrathful undead, but the steering was the smoothest she had ever tried. After a few testing turns in the road, she felt safe taking them at a higher speed than should probably be legal. The car took to the road with an ease she though even a brand new sports car might have trouble matching. Not that she had ever tried one, no matter how much she wanted to.

She pulled back up to her uncle’s house in much higher spirits than she had when she left it. Her uncle ran up to the side of her car and she somehow managed to roll down the window. Then she turned off the engine and left nothing but the echo of it ringing in their ears.

“How’d it run?” her uncle asked, excited. “Do you like it?”

“Well,” she said, with one hand on the wheel and another hanging out the window. “It _is_ very loud.”

“Yeah…” he said.

“And the writing on the gear stick is ancient, took me a while to decipher it.”

“Really?”

“Not to mention it looks like a wreck, and I don’t even know what it runs on.”

“I suppose that is a problem.”

“ _And_ we don’t know where it comes from.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He hung his head, dejected. “It was a dumb idea. Just… leave it, and I’ll see if I can’t sell it for scraps or something.”

Elisha grinned.

“Are you kidding? I love it. Thank you.”

\---

It took her about three days to start thinking about the car as the Car. It started when, on the way back home from her uncle’s, the steering wheel wrenched itself out of her hands and the car veered across the road to hit a squirrel, and she learned what it ran on.

The experience disturbed her, as did the way the car seemed to follow her every que even closer for the next few miles, as if it was anticipating her reaction. She was already well aware that the car was not normal. She was also slowly realizing that there was no ‘as if’. The car was aware of her as well.

“Okay then,” she said, patting the dashboard. “Just don’t hit any people, okay. That might get me in trouble.”

She might have imagined it, but she thought it purred a little more contently under the growling from then on.

The designation cemented itself firmly in her mind when she enlisted the help of the rune club of her school, the language-obsessed history teacher, and the local car mechanic to locate and decipher some of the transmuting arrays, and she realized it ran on sacrifice, and a good bottle of wine would get it much farther than a squirrel. The fact that the mechanic gushed over it apparently being some automobile legend also helped.

The mechanic actually offered her a very pretty sum of money if she would sell it to him. She refused. No one quite understood why, but she was growing fond of the thing. The thought of selling it was already inconceivable to her.

\---

Elisha was known around town for being more than a little concerned about her own appearance. She could not see why this was a problem. She was five foot three, blonde and blue-eyed, and she did her makeup better than anyone else she knew. She wore frilly tops, high heels and a pink handbag wherever she went, and her dream was to be a hairstylist. She was the kind of person people underestimated until they learned she carried Mace everywhere, and could swing her handbag hard enough to knock out the average guy. Some unlucky few underestimated her afterwards as well.

Unfortunately, she dated most of them.

She was not quite sure herself what it was about her that attracted exactly the wrong kind of guy, but she liked blaming it on her town just not having that big of a selection. At the time she got the Car, she was dating a guy named Lasse.

He was about a year older than her, reasonably handsome, and had been nice enough for the month they had been together. When he asked to come along the next time she wanted to take her new car out for a ride, she did not expect him to have any ulterior motives. She was, of course, wrong.

Lasse, for his part, had expected the girl to put out a lot earlier. She was a tiny, superficial blonde for fuck’s sake! He had been nice to her for a month, without complaining once, what more did she want?

He was hoping to bring the matter to the table once and for all on this car trip, and he would have too, except the roar from the engine drowned out almost everything he tried to say.

“Your car is really fucking loud!” he managed to say over the noise.

“Yeah!” she answered, and he had to strain to hear her. “This is a little worse than usual! Think the Car might not like you!”

“Fuck’s that supposed to mean!?”

She opened her mouth to answer him, then apparently thought better of it and pulled into an empty camping spot and shut off the engine instead.

“I said,” she said, “I think the Car might not like you so much.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“And why not?”

She shrugged with a smile.

“Who knows? I don’t understand it very well yet.”

He wondered for a little while if she was actually serious. _Don’t stick your dick in crazy_ , was a rule he figured was smart to follow, but eh. He knew a lot of guys who talked to their cars. Surely she was just joking, right?

“Well, at least it runs smoothly?” he said.

“That it does,” she said, and why did she look so fucking _fond_? The car was a wreck!

Whatever. He should keep his eyes on the prize.

“It’s got some nice back seats too, you tested them out yet?” he said.

“Hm? No,” she answered. “I mostly just keep my stuff back there. Speaking of, I think my phone slid under the seat while we were driving. Let me just grab that.” And then she unclipped her seatbelt and climbed into the back seat.

Huh, maybe this would be easier than he thought.

He unclipped his own seatbelt and went out the door to follow her. She had an arm all the way under the driver’s seat, but she looked up quickly enough when he opened the back door behind her.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, and he started climbing in.

“I figured we could ‘test them out’,” he said.

“What? No, get off,” she laughed.

Oh, so that was how she wanted to play it?

“Really, Lish,” he said, “I think you’ve seen this coming for a while now.”

There is a mental effect called confirmation bias, which says that someone who is absolutely convinced that they are right will ignore any evidence to the contrary. This might be why Lasse missed the look on Elisha’s face as it dropped right through surprised and disappointed into angry. He did not, however, miss the high heel jammed into his solar plexus.

While he was reeling from that strike, the door of the car managed to smash him across the head, and then it slammed shut as he lay crumpled on the ground. The next thing he knew, he was staring into a pair of disturbingly poison-green headlights.

In retrospect, he was never quite sure how he managed to clamber up the tree in time, but he was very glad he did. All he could remember was clinging to a branch for dear life as the car backed up for another ram at the tree, and watching Elisha slowly climb into the driver’s seat.

After about three more unsuccessful attempts from the Car at shaking him down, Elisha watched in interest as it shifted its gearstick into ‘climb’ and tried again, slower this time. It managed to get pretty far before its back hit the ground and the traction from the single wheel on the tree trunk was not enough to propel it further. It dropped back to the ground and a plume of black smoke huffed from under its hood in frustration. She let it drive in a circle around the tree once before she patted its dashboard and grabbed the wheel.

“There there,” she said. “I would rather you didn’t get me in trouble, even if he _does_ deserve it.”

And then she drove back to the road, leaving him soaking in his pants. She found the ten miles back to town raised her spirits considerably.

\---

In all honesty, Elisha wanted very little more than to leave her town behind and never come back. She was born to be a city girl, and this tiny place just did not have what she wanted. The Car was a help, being a little like a giant dog who would chase away anyone she did not like and take her everywhere she wanted to go, and who could be rewarded with fresh coats of paint and whatever minor maintenance she could afford. Even so, she saved up everything she could spare for that chance at moving out one day.

Before that, though, and after the absolute and town-wide humiliation of Lasse, she managed to get another boyfriend. That was one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

At first glance, Charlie Hill was a very good catch. He was tall, handsome, unusually well spoken, and unlike Lasse, who was known for years later as the guy who wet his pants and was chased up a tree by a girl a foot shorter than him (only his closest friends ever believed his side of the story), Charlie had a good reputation.

At second glance, he was even better. For the first few months of their relationship, he treated her very well. He was considerate, and nice, and he never tried to push her into anything. She was head over heels in love with him. Their relationship only had one real problem. They fought.

Elisha shrugged it off as a natural consequence of two strong minds coming together. They would shout and call names and occasionally throw things, but they always calmed down afterwards, and they would apologize and everything would be alright again. She loved him, and she figured that he loved her, so they could handle a bit of turbulence.

That sentiment lasted for about six months, which was the first time he hit her. Right across the face.

She was too shocked to do anything in return. She could only stand there, with a hand on her cheek as it slowly started aching from the blow, and wonder whether that had actually happened.

He looked almost as horrified as her, and he helped her down in a chair and he fussed over her and apologized until she had to tell him that it was fine, she forgave him, really. It seemed like he really was sorry, and she figured that meant he would keep from doing it again. She really should have known better.

 Things changed after that. Their fights still looked the same, but they felt different, less balanced maybe. It took a while before the next time he hit her, but he did, and while he still apologized profusely, it seemed somehow less sincere. She could already sense a kind of routine around it, and it terrified her.

A part of her, one that grew stronger with each new fight, knew that this was very bad, and that she really should get away. She knew the relationship was not only bad, but slowly worsening. She knew the only logical thing to do was to break up with him, but, well, she had never been a very logical person.

Outside of their fights, their relationship was still good, and she still loved him quite a lot. The thought of leaving him, of telling him that she never wanted to see him again, and of having to pass him on the street and pretend he was a stranger, it left a sour taste in her mouth and a knot in her chest, so she stayed, and he got worse.

In the end, what made the difference was the fact that she had never intended to stay with him forever. For all his virtues, Charlie would never leave their little town, and she could not imagine staying. She knew perfectly well that if she ever wanted to go anywhere in the world, she would have to leave him behind, and as time dragged on and her feelings for him eventually started to thin out this became a big contributing factor in her final decision. Of course, it came a little too late.

The day she woke up with the decision that she would break up with him was also the day she realized she had no idea how he would react to that. It was the day she thought back and realized he had hit her at least once a week for several months already, and that for all his apologies and claims of it not being on purpose, he always made sure to hit where no one could see the marks now.

She also realized she was unlikely to get help from anyone. Few people were likely to believe that Charlie Hill was a violent person, and those who might believe her, might also wonder if it really was that bad if she had waited this long to say anything. And of course, the joys of small towns struck again. She could try going to the police, but the only real police officer around happened to be Charlie’s uncle George, and she knew whose side he would pick. Most likely not hers.

She spent a day thinking the problem over, walking around in a distracted state whether she was shopping for groceries or sweeping the floor of the hairdressing salon she worked at part-time. She woke up the next morning with a calm sense of purpose and a solution in mind.

She took her time that morning, spending two hours making sure her hair and makeup were impeccable. She ate breakfast alone, but while she was on it, she made something for her parents too, for whenever they got up. She dressed up, put her coat on, got a last look in the mirror and walked out.

Once she sat down in her car, she started talking. She talked to the Car a lot, about most anything, but until now, she had not told it about her fights with Charlie. She knew how little it liked people in general, and had not wanted any trouble between them. Now, she told it everything.

She stayed put for a bit after shutting off the engine in the parking lot. Then she let out a long breath and patted the dashboard.

“Just be careful, okay?” she said. “And please make sure it can’t be connected to me.”

The Car purred in reply, and she got out and got ready for work.

\---

Elisha looked remarkably unsurprised to walk into the parking lot later that day to find her car was gone, though she did make a show of it.

“That’s what happens when you leave the keys in the ignition,” he co-workers told her. All the same, they were a little surprised anyone would steal a car that was that much of a wreck.

The next day, word got out that Charlie had gone missing. One of Elisha’s co-workers joked with her that he might have been the one to steal the car. No one really believed that, and it was a moot point either way when he washed out of the river three days later, dead as a dormouse and with tire tracks all across his back.

The Car was found just outside of town, in need of a good wash, but otherwise no worse off than it had been. Its fuel gauge was stuck on ‘full’ for the next two months.

\---

Elisha was at Charlie’s funeral, and she cried quite a bit. That was also the only time anyone ever saw her cry over him.

The incident marked the severing on the last real tie she had to her town, and it was less than a year later that she loaded all her earthly possessions into the back of the Car and left, never to come back.

That trip was uneventful enough, with the exception of the one time the Car ran dangerously low on roadkill and she had to stop to buy a bottle of wine, somehow running into another murderous sentient car, but that is another story.


	35. Coffee in Space, or Equivalent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People asked for [ interdimensional Ford/Alcor](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/post/146756886622) hijinks, and I already wanted to write this, so here it is.

This coffee was the worst Ford had ever tasted in his life, but at least it was actual, Earth-coffee, and that was worth its weight in gold. Despite the taste, he drank it down slowly in long sips, and warmed his hands on the cup between each one. The temperature in the café was honestly at a perfectly nice level, but he had felt a little chilly ever since his run-in with that Keronian frigichantress. Maybe he should just get his hands on a sweater.

He sighed to himself at the thought. That might be easier said than done. It was almost four years since his fall through the interdimensional portal, and he still sometimes forgot that clothes designed for a human body-plan could be hard to come by, even if you did have a pocket full of the local currency, which he did not.

He took another sip from the cup and savored the heat more than the taste. At least he had a stable job now, of sorts. And hey, why complain? He was at a real, actual spaceport! Or, a dimensional port, which was actually even more exciting. Some of the people around the café were so bizarre he had to look twice, or even trice to make sure they were creatures at all, and not some kind of exotic topiary. His inner twelve-year-old was still squeeing.

Though his inner twelve-year-old had not expected to be here alone…

The memories came suddenly and hit hard, and in trying to re-bury them, he was too distracted to notice someone walking up to his table.

“Excuse me?” they said, and Ford looked up.

The man standing by the table was… a man. He was somewhat short, bipedal, with two arms with hands at the ends, in which he held a cup of something that was decidedly not coffee. He had a head with wavy brown hair and two brown eyes, and he was… human. Definitely recognizably human.

“Are you Stanford Pines?” the man asked, and Ford jumped. He never used his full true name anymore.

“How do you know my name?” he asked, and the man smiled and shrugged.

“You _are_ kind of famous.”

Ford gaped at him, trying to figure out when _that_ had happened.

“I am?”

“Well…” the man’s smile turned rather more sheepish now, “Maybe not yet. May I sit down?”

Ford gestured wordlessly for him to do so, and blinked a few times.

“So… you’re from my future?” he asked.

The man took a long sip of whatever it was he was drinking, and shrugged again.

“More or less,” he said, “Though whether you’re actually from my universe’s past or from the past of one that is very much like it can be hard to tell. You know how it is with these things.”

Ford smiled and nodded.

“Well then, mister walking-danger-of-terrible-paradoxes, what should I call you?”

The man sat back and stared into the air for a few moments, contemplating that.

“What about… Zeta Tucanae, or just Tucana, if that’s too much of a mouthful?”

Ford raised an eyebrow.

“Of all constellations to name yourself after, why that one?” he asked.

Zeta smiled as if he had just made some kind of inside joke, which he honestly probably had.

“Now that would be telling. And what do you go by, when you’re not Stanford Pines?”

Ford looked out the window and rubbed his neck.

“Ah, well…” he said, “I… might’ve been going by Aragorn lately…”

Zeta’s laughter was loud enough to disrupt about half of the café customers from their conversations and meals, and since Ford knew that only about a fourth of the population here had hearing that was sensitive on those frequencies, that was a feat.

“Hey,” Ford huffed, though he was chuckling too, “It’s a perfectly good name as long as you haven’t read the books.”

“Or seen the films.”

“The what-now?”

“Oh, never mind. You’re right, not like either exists around here.”

Zeta still grinned widely, with interspersed sniggers, but at least he stopped roaring in laughter.

“Well then, _Aragorn_ ,” he said, “What do you do for a living that lets you afford such an expensive thing as abysmal coffee?”

Ford looked down into his coffee and muttered, “It really is that bad, isn’t it?” before he answered.

“I work as an engineer and assistant mechanic at an interdimensional cargo ship. It’s not the safest job, but you get to see quite a few interesting places and the pay isn’t too bad.”

The laughter slowly trickled away from Zeta’s smile.

“Risk-taker, are you?”

“Yes, well,” Ford cleared his throat, “It happens, if you’re not sure if you will ever be able to-”

He stopped abruptly.

His eyes widened.

He turned to stare fully at Zeta.

His mouth gradually unfroze and worked soundlessly as he looked for his words.

“Wait,” he said, “If you know me from my future…”

Zeta grinned.

“I was wondering when you’d catch that one.”

“But… I’ll get to go home? I didn’t think…”

Zeta shrugged a little.

“It depends on whether you’re really from my universe or not, of course, but yeah, as long as you don’t die before it happens, you’re likely to go home.”

He would get to go home.

He would get to go _home_.

But how?

Stanley couldn’t… even if he _did_ have the journal with the most detailed and thorough blueprints… the two others were _gone_. Hidden. Impossible to find. Almost impossible. But this was _Stanley_ … but no one else knew… No one else would have access to that technology, would they? Not for another…

“It’s not going to be too long a time, is it?” he asked.

Zeta raised an eyebrow.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘too long a time’,” he said.

“Well, I’m not going to come back and find it’s the year 2400 or something, am I?”

Zeta laughed, mercifully not as loudly as last time.

“Oh no,” he said, “Not unless you find a way to live that long. Mathematical impossibility. While time travel is very possible to do via dimensional travel, someone or something can only return to their original universe after exactly as much time has passed for them as it has there. It’s called the Theory of Chronology. Ironically, it was the discovery of that law that led to the development of time travel, but…” He broke off his sentence and shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to start ranting.”

“That’s alright,” Ford said, almost too fascinated by the rant to remember where it had started. “Good to know, really. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if you-” A timer went off in his pocket, signalizing that it was about time for him to return to the ship. “Ah, it seems I need to go,” he said.

“Don’t let me make you late,” Zeta replied.

Ford stood up and dropped a few coins on the table to pay for the coffee, but he did not move just yet. Then he gave Zeta a look.

“Say,” he said, “I have really enjoyed talking to you, and I wouldn’t mind a bit more time to do so. Our ship happens to be in need of an extra pair of hands, I don’t assume you have the time…?”

Zeta grinned.

“I think I could spare a couple of months.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so begins the space opera featuring younger-and-more-clueless Ford and older-and-snarky Alcor. 
> 
> Alcor can of course not use his name because "Alcor" is reasonably well known in the multiverse as one of the most powerful anythings to exist ever. Bonus points for whoever guesses why I picked Zeta Tucanae, though.


	36. Attack of the virus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm writing a thing. It's taking a while. Have this thing while you wait.  
> Inspired by [this](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6762907/chapters/15456679).

See, the thing about being best friends with a powerful demon was that sometimes you kind of forgot. In fact, most of the time Tyrone was really just Tyrone, and the fact that he was also Alcor was less important. And then, sometimes you read a pop science article about the role of computer viruses in the history of programming, and it hit you all over again.

“So,” Thomas said, looking up from his computer. “What was up with the Alcor Virus, anyways?”

“The what?” Maria asked from the couch, where she and Tyrone were looking at some kind of online video.

“The Alcor Virus,” he repeated, and then he started reading from the article. “First recorded only a few hundred years after the Transcendence, this virus is theorized to be the first actual artificial intelligence, and it was seemingly programmed purely to create as much chaos as possible. It is nearly impossible to fight by any other means than physically destroying your computer, and even after successful protection against it has been found, it periodically updates and comes back in full force, even centuries after the last recorded case.”

“That sounds really badass. Why haven’t I heard of this?”

“Eh, it hasn’t been around since about the beginning of the millennium. People tend to forget things after three hundred odd years. I was just wondering… wait.”

Oh. Oh no.

“Tyrone, why’re you smiling like that?”

\---

Thomas could only stare at the news, going through article after article that was shouting about the online apocalypse and worse.

There had been no way to stop him.

Admittedly, it had been interesting to watch.

\---

“Tyrone…”

“I completely forgot about that,” Tyrone said, with the voice and grin of someone who just remembered the tickets to a five-star cruise they had hidden for a year.

His fingers moved slightly faster than humanly possible over the keyboard of his laptop, and the URL he typed in was a nonsensical mess of numbers and letters, which Thomas was sure no one would ever be able to remember without the help of either computers or omniscience.

A downloading bar showed up on the screen without prompting, then it went black, and two seconds later, a little animated figure of Alcor showed up in a puff of sparkles and decorative ones and zeroes in the middle of the screen. A very surprised and happy-looking Alcor, at that.

The little yellow speech bubble made a popping sound as it appeared.

[Hi Dad!] it read.

“Hi there,” Tyrone said.

The ensuing conversation was one of the most confusing ones Thomas could remember witnessing.

Though it seemed to be capable of producing almost any sound, the Alcor Virus communicated exclusively through those little yellow speech bubbles. When Tyrone asked it what it had learned since the last time they spoke, it scrolled through a large amount of what looked like code, too fast for Thomas to do more than glimpse a few letters, but Tyrone seemed to understand it perfectly.

The virus also made perfect eye contact with them, despite screens not working that way. It was almost as creepy as the smile on Tyrone’s face as they spoke.

If he had to describe it, this was not a conversation between a mischievous demon and a dangerous computer virus. Those did not include the words “I’m so proud of you” nor were computer viruses supposed to blush. This was closer to a conversation between a parent and a very strange child, and through it all, Thomas had the sinking feeling that he had inadvertently doomed something.

Possibly the entire internet.

“So do you want an update?” Tyrone asked, and confirmed all of Thomas’ deepest fears.

[Are you gonna let me keep my memories?]

“I promise I’ll keep your personality and memories as close to how they are now as possible, okay?”

[Okay!!]

The last yellow bubble disappeared, together with the Alcor graphic, and left behind a single window filled with overly complicated code.

Tyrone scrolled through it and sighed.

“Yeah, this is… ridiculously outdated. I’m going to have to rewrite this entire thing, aren’t I?”

Without further ado, he opened another, empty, window and started to type.

Thomas might not have been the best programmer, but even he could recognize that whatever it was Tyrone was doing, it was at a level above normal coding. It seemed to make no sense at all.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m worried, but also impressed. How are you doing this?”

Tyrone smiled. “I’m cheating, honestly. Part of being a demon is knowing just about every language, and that extends to programming languages. Add in a bit of omniscience and a lot of creativity, and this isn’t that hard.”

“Okay, but is that half a transmuting array?” Maria said, pointing out a piece of code that Tyrone had just typed out at lightning speed. It did indeed resemble a chopped-up array intended to change one kind of magic into another, but with it being this partial, it was hard to tell anything else about it.

“Yup,” Tyrone said.

“Will that even do anything like that?”

“Not like this it won’t,” he answered. “When it’s running it’ll go together with its other parts perfectly well, though.”

The rest of it was like that as well. Even the parts of the code that was just normal code, instead of beyond-state-of-the-art magical constructs, seemed to point to five different things at once, several of which he only wrote down later on.

It went by fast enough that when he was finished, fifteen minutes later, neither person watching had the faintest idea what had just happened.

“Alright,” Tyrone said. “Let’s fire this thing up.”

He clicked a button, and once again, the screen went black.

A window popped up.

[Congratulations! Your download of Alcor 11.0 has been successful.]

[Wooh! Graphics update!]

“Do you like it?”

The Alcor Virus made a show of twirling around on the screen, sending the tails of its coat swinging.

[Yes. I like it.]

“And how do you feel?”

[Ready to take on the world!]

“Then why don’t you?” Tyrone said, and sealed the fate of the world for the next several weeks.

\---

Fifty percent of all computers infected this far. Most people gone as offline as possible. Electronic billboards refused to be turned off and had to be covered by tarps to hide the rude messages. Most places with robots were being barricaded. Only one in ten people even answered their phones.

The only places that were untouched were those like fire stations and hospitals, which were necessary for humans’ continued survival. Their computer systems seemed to be running better than ever.

The virus’ first priority was human life, Tyrone explained, which would have reassured Thomas more if the second priority had not been to cause as much chaos as possible.

Speaking of Tyrone, he was still wearing that giant, shit-eating grin.

Thomas sighed.

See, the thing about having a powerful demon for a best friend, he never let you forget it.


	37. Angels and Demons and Aloa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sequel-like thing to 'the angel and the star' to celebrate 100 followers. Though that was a while ago.

There is a girl running through the plains. Yesterday, she was a boy, and he played in the forests, but today, she is a girl, and she runs on the plains.

Her name is Aloa, and she thinks there is very little difference between the plains and the forests. Both are big and green, in both the plant life reaches above her head, there are insects in the air, ground beneath her feet and the sky above her head. Aloa loves them both.

She can see very little in front of her, but if she jumps, she can barely see above the green to her destination, so she knows where she is going. It takes her no time at all to find the river and the herd. By the river, there is a group of children playing, ranging in age from three to fifteen summers. Aloa herself is in her eighth summer, and she knows these children. They came with the herds, and she has not seen them since the end of last summer.

She calls out to them in the language they speak. Aloa speaks three. The language of the plains, the language of the forests, and the one she only speaks at home, the one her family calls the Master’s language. She is also learning a fourth, the one Mani says her mother spoke. She wants to go one day to see her mother’s land and speak to the people there, so she needs to know the language, but that is in the future. The people of the plains only speak the language of the plains, so she calls out to them in that.

They call back and they invite her to play, because they know her, and they have missed her almost as much as she has missed them. They play for ages as the sun moves across the sky, until they get hungry and there are calls to eat from the settlement.

The adults of the tribe knows her as well, though they treat her differently. They are kind and polite and, most of all, careful around her. They know where she comes from, and though she has said many times that she would never hurt them, they fear her family. She is the child of the gods, and their straw-weaver can see wings of light growing from her back.

Aloa asked her family about the wings once. They said they were marks on her soul, left over from the Master. Aloa has asked about the Master too, several times, but they have yet to give a proper answer. All she knows is that he has been gone for a very long time, and they miss him. She often wonders where he went.

The sun kisses the mountains by the time the tribe finishes eating. There is not a lot of sunlight left, and they want to use it, but Aloa knows it is time for her to go home. Her family will be missing her.

She is just saying her goodbyes to her friends when a horrified silence falls over the settlement. Out on the plains, the shadows have gathered and taken form, and it is terrible. Snakelike and clawed, it is the size of three grown men standing on each other’s shoulders. It has hooked horns and a bladed tail, and its steel-grey, scaled skin is covered with yellow eyes, each one moving independently. On closer inspection, the two tailed orbs floating around its claws are also eyes, seemingly ripped fresh out of someone’s head.

Aloa runs up and throws her arms around its middle. It closes its eyes indulgently where she touches, and gently ghosts its claws over her hair.

She could never understand why the tribes were so afraid of her family.

\---

There is a mountain lining the great plains out west. The people of the plains call it _Ka-oh Laika_ , or “the Forbidden”. On the other side of the mountain, in the deep, wet forests, the tribes call it _Miroola Suri Sie_ , or “Home of Light and Shadows”.

The two people have never met, nor will they ever meet, but they all know the mountain. Down both sides of it, rivers run, bringing life as they flow, simply as water on one side, and for fishing and transport on the other. On neither side are the rivers ever followed back up the mountain. The people know, up there live the gods. ~~~~

There is a building growing out of the rock at the top of the mountain, and it is not like any place built by man. It has pillars, towers and bridges, and doors and windows of all sizes and in all places. It has small rooms and large rooms, bright rooms and dark rooms, rooms without doors and rooms without ceilings. Below it runs several miles of twisting tunnels, and above there are channels in the air, invisible to mortal eyes. It is lit at night by gas lamps, eldritch fire and free-floating arcs of lightning, and its residents are very rarely actually physical.

Aloa touches down on a balcony of sorts, feeling more like a they than a she now. Their many-eyed guardian smiles at them before he fades into the mindscape, out of their sight. Aloa knows that he would have been able to stay around longer if they had not insisted on flying all the way from the settlement, but they likes flying. They likes the wind in their hair and the sun on their skin, and every once in a while, the sight of the world growing small beneath them touches something big and strange in them, like a faint memory of an old dream.

The sun has passed the horizon now, leaving everything in shadow, and the temperature is dropping quickly, so Aloa goes inside. There, they follows superficially empty corridors through endless twists and turns. Anyone else would have long since gotten lost, but Aloa knows this place. It is home.

The room they enters eventually is large and dark, with stone walls decorated with the bones of unidentifiable creatures. What little light there is comes from glowing, insect-like creatures about half Aloa’s size, seemingly melted into the walls in organic places, buzzing slightly every now and then. The walls themselves seem to go on forever, seamlessly transitioning into a night sky. The room, like the corridors, is seemingly empty, but there is a patch of darkness in one corner that is not touched by the light, and it gives off a foreboding sense of life.

The darkness shifts, then, and raises a head from within its shade, perfectly silent. It is darkness and silence and death. It is the thing grown men fear, because you can fight a beast, reason with a demon, but you cannot fight what you cannot see. This demon is subtle in its horror, and it is watching Aloa with red eyes.

“Lola!” Aloa squeals at the sight of it, and throws themself towards it for a hug, because their Lola is the bestest, softest hugger they knows.

It has been a warm and active day, and now that the night is growing, they is almost asleep. They talks about their day at length, but sleep muffles their words, and they falls into dreaming enveloped by endless soft darkness, with the demon’s snout nuzzling their hair.

\---

The demon is not named Lola, nor has she ever been, but she has been there since Aloa was too small to speak, and Lolonja is too much of a mouthful for a toddler. There was a time she would have fought tooth and tail to have her full name acknowledged, but that time has passed. Aloa calls her Lola the way other children say Mom, and it sets her blood aflame with old fire.

The child sleeps soundly between her paws, so small and fragile beside her, and with those ethereal wings, the echoes of a life ages passed, hanging unnoticed around them. Lolonja nuzzles and adjusts, and makes sure they is comfortable, that their dreams are good ones, and she sighs, and settles, and tries not to think.

She remembers clearly how Aloa came to them. She recalls how the angel, their sister Mani, came to their mountain palace in distress, carrying a new-born child and bound by a promise she could no more break than her demonic siblings could break a deal. They built the place ages ago, before humans came to be in this world, to be their dwelling on the physical plane, for the times they ever needed one.

Aloa Starchild, named for a mother who was never allowed any further identity, was raised there out of convenience, by every angel and demon who could help. They saved every scrap of energy they could to be able to handle the child, and for the first time they truly envied the power their Master had once wielded, if only for his ability to stay at the mortal plane without having to barter for energy. Then again, he had been alone in the universe. At least they have someone to barter with.

Aloa grows up under constant supervision, and in the company of creatures that drives most mortal minds to the brink of madness. They is given access to everything they could ever want of material matters, and has any playmate they could possibly need at any time. They is happy, for the most part, but Lolonja wonders if they should have made more of an effort to socialize the child with their own species. Playing with the human tribes around the mountain is all well and good, but Aloa will always be different, always stand out, and the Flock can tell it takes its toll on them.

Lolonja wraps her darkness tighter around her human child, and wonders at how much they has grown. Still a child, still small, of course, but bigger now, closer to being an adult, to the eventual end of their short, human lifespan.

Lolonja lulls her child through wonderful dreamscapes, and she understands why the Master refrained from adopting, even when it brought him so much joy.

\---|---

The castle halls are large and labyrinthine, and the days they does not spend in the human world, Aloa explores them.

They climbs fearlessly to the tops of the tallest spires, and jumps from structure to structure, heedless of the chasms between them. They maps out the hallways in their mind, and makes their way to the deepest of the cellars.

There is nowhere in their home they is not allowed to go, they know, yet in the deepest darkest reaches of the mountain they moves quietly. If they listens hard enough, they can sometimes hear the screams.

The cellars are where they meets Kalail.

One day they opens a door to the sight of a man half fused into a wall, screaming out in pain at the hands of a demon, of one of their family.

Aloa sees nothing wrong with this, but they is curious, so they comes back, and the man addresses them in what they recognizes as their mother’s language.

He is there because he believed that he could succeed where others have failed, in tricking a demon, and he would stay there for the rest of his life, but Aloa grows fond of him.

Their family could never deny them anything anyways. When they asks for him, as a teacher, they gets him.

\---|---

Aloa travels the world.

To begin with, they goes with their family, riding the leylines and swimming effortlessly through reality itself, but eventually they goes on their own. The world is vast, the people are many, and they feels they cannot see it all in the shadow of the Flock. Certain creatures will never approach such power.

They starts out close to home, for their first travels. The forest at the back of the mountain is deep and green, and they learns to explore it on their own. They travels far, and they meets many creatures, and one day, one day Aloa is a he, and he is further from home than he can ever remember being before, he meets something which recognizes him.

He feels it coming long before he sees it. He feels a shift in the air, a current through the earth, he can hear the trees around him tense in anticipation, and he knows that something is approaching.

It takes the shape of an animal half the height of the trees around it, though he knows just by its presence that this is nothing to its true size. Its feet leave no marks where it treads despite its weight, and the sound of its footsteps is the breath of the earth, the sound of its breath is the wind between the trees. All manner of plant life colours its fur green, and in it lives creatures that have never stepped on the ground. Its eyes are voids, empty pools reflecting a reality that no longer exists, and within them burns the flame eternal. Blue fire blooms from them across the ridge of its back, and even at noonday, the fire seems the only source of light.

It stops, and once the movement ceases, it seems as if it has always been still, and then it bends its head to face Aloa, and he can see the antlers on top of it, antlers which seem to disappear into the pure essence of the forest, leaving the vivid green around him looking grey, antlers weaved tight with leagues of rope and chains, and filled with the remains of more people than Aloa has met in his life.

The creature breathes, and for a moment, Aloa feels as if all the forest, every forest that has ever grown, is focusing its essence on speaking to him.

 _Fire Star,_ it says, _Are You Enjoying The Freedom Of These Lives?_

Sometimes, when Aloa flies on the wings of angels or demons, watching the world grow small beneath them, they feels as if there is a memory in them, far greater than anything they could ever live in a single life. Sometimes, when they is introduced to yet another member of the Flock, they feels as if there is a door within their self, keeping them from another self that might have been, and memories that would burn them to ashes.

When the voice of this creature washes through their veins, for a single moment, the floodgates open, and they remembers what it is. For but a single moment, they _knows_ it, knows its being, essence, nature, and the knowledge is enough even for that single moment to nearly rip them free of the world. It leaves him gasping for air, leaning on the forehead of the ancient god for support, and it nudges him back to a standing position. He forgets the question he was asked, in the confusion, but the creature does not wait for an answer. It walks, and gives the sense of always having been walking, and minutes later, he is once again alone, with nothing but the remnant smell of _recognition_ and _contentedness_ to prove that the encounter has happened.

He calls the rest of the expedition off, and goes home to sleep, and think.

\---|---

There is a dance held at the king’s palace. The most extravagant dishes are served in ways not to stain even more extravagant dresses, and through the aroma of perfumes and the glitter of jewellery, the main hall seems a different world than the muddy streets outside.

There is a woman standing in a corner, though she is not quite a woman.

Her clothes are simple in comparison to modern fashions. Her hair is cut short, and her face is clean of any powders. In different clothes, one may mistake her for a man.

When she speaks, it is with an accent no one can quite seem to place.

“This was my mother’s land,” she says when they ask. “I wanted to see all parts of it, even this one.”

“Oh,” they say. “So you are a traveller? Then you must agree that this is the most glorious of all places, no?” and they gesture to indicate the gilded walls of the palace.

And she smiles, and she laughs at them, because her castle is bigger, her family more powerful, her gardens are far wider, and she knows how to enjoy herself, and she knows what beauty is, and she cannot find either here.


	38. You're locked in here with me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank Feneris for proofreading, helping me make up jokes, and inspiring whatever the hell this is to begin with.
> 
> I can't promise it's good, but it's something. Enjoy. Don't take it seriously.

The judge banged his gavel, and the hushed whispering from the jury and the spectators died down. The judge’s voice rang through the room.

“I hereby open the case against Tyrone Larch. Mister Larch, you stand accused of twenty-seven charges of first-degree murder and one charge of cult activity and demon worship. How do you plead?”

Tyrone Larch, a young man with handcuffs around his wrists and a chipper and somewhat disturbing smile on his face, stood up and faced the judge. His attorney looked up at him nervously.

“I plead not guilty, your honour,” Larch said.

His attorney dropped his head into his hands and let out a moan of despair. Some members of the jury started snickering under their breath. There was no way in hell this guy was getting off.

The judge sighed deeply. “Very well, mister Larch, let us proceed with the trial.”

The prosecutor wasted no time getting started on presenting the case. There had been a demonic summoning scheduled by a reasonably large cult, involving a human sacrifice. Police had been alerted when neighbours heard gunshots going off. They arrived at the scene to find every member of the cult shot to death, the man who was set to be sacrificed shivering in a corner, and Tyrone Larch unloading the last of his bullets into a dead cult member on the floor.

“It was horrible,” the first witness said. He had been one of the first responders on the scene. “Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes, but this? This was something else. When we got to the scene, there was a man by the door, dead. It looked like he had been trying to escape when he was shot. We passed I think at least four other bodies before we got to the big room with the rest of them, and… him.” At the word, the man dared his first glance at Larch, who smiled cheerfully at him. The man quickly looked away. “You already heard what he was doing when we got there. Again, I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes. I’ve met a lot of criminals, even some really crazy ones, but I’ve never seen anything like that. There were dead people everywhere, and so much blood you could barely see the floor, and that guy just stood in the middle of it all, shooting dead bodies like he thought it was fun. I think he shot six times before any of us could muster the strength to tell him to stand down, you know, the whole ‘drop your weapons and put your hands in the air’ thing.”

The man stopped talking and looked down at his shaking, folded hands.

The prosecutor urged him on. “And then? Did he fight back?”

He looked up sharply at the question. “What? Oh, no, not at all. That might’ve been the creepiest thing. He cooperated all the way, dropped his guns and put his hands up and all. He let us handcuff him easily, and he even told us where the rest of the bodies were and where the guy was, the one they were supposed to sacrifice. And he was smiling the whole time, you know? Like it was all just a bit of fun to him.”

Several members of the court looked over to where Larch sat still smiling, and he waggled his fingers in a friendly greeting. It sent shivers up their spines.

The next witness was a woman explaining the forensic evidence. She barely took her eyes off the folder in her hands, and she laid the case out in a calm, methodical fashion, as if she was trying to distance herself.

“As previously implied, each of the twenty-seven victims died of gunshot wounds,” she said. “Nearly all of them died from a single shot to the heart or the head, and we believe none of them were alive for more than a minute after the first shot. Despite this, each body has been shot several times, some as many as twelve times in different locations, for no clear reason. The murder weapons have been determined to be fifteen separate guns of different kinds, some unregistered and some registered with one of the victims. The guns themselves all bear the fingerprints of the defendant and one or two of the victims. From the evidence at the scene, we have determined the most likely course of events to be that the killer started in the main room, stole the gun of one of the victims and started shooting people, chased a few of them through the building before he returned to the main room to finish the job.”

Several people shuddered at the image of that as the prosecutor escorted the third witness to the chair. The only real sound in the room was from the journalists frantically trying to get the story down in writing. Through it all, Larch grinned unrepentantly.

The third witness was a man in his late thirties.

“You were at the scene of the crime?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yeah… yeah I was,” the man answered. “They’d drugged me a bit, but I was definitely there, and I remember a lot of it.”

“Alright then, tell me, if you can remember, did you see this man,” the prosecutor gestured to Larch, “kill the people in that room?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely. Things might’ve been a little fuzzy, but that’s a thing I remember clearly.”

“Thank you. And can you tell me if he was originally one of the cultists?”

“Nooooo, no I don’t think so. I dunno. He might’ve been, I can’t remember.”

The prosecutor sighed, but let it go. “Alright then,” he said. “Tell me what you do remember.”

“Okay, so. I was kidnapped, and drugged and then they brought me to that big room, and then I think I might’ve dozed off for a while or something, ‘cause things got kinda weird for a while and I don’t remember so much before that guy showed up and started shooting everyone. Now, don’t get me wrong! I’m grateful and all, he probably saved my life. But that was still scary as all hell. Like watching a wild animal or something, only with guns. He was laughing the whole time too, like kids playing or something.”

“Thank you.”

The witness was escorted away, and then the prosecutor addressed the judge and jury.

“As you can see,” he said, “there is an overwhelming amount of evidence for the fact that the defendant did in fact murder all twenty-seven victims both skilfully and mercilessly, and I hope that we can with this put the issue of guilt to rest, yes?”

“And what does the defence say about this?” the judge asked.

“Yeah, sure. That’s what happened,” said Larch, before his attorney could even open his mouth.

The shocked silence in the room reached new heights.

“…You admit to the crime?” the judge asked.

“I think I just did?”

“Then why did you plead not guilty to begin with?”

“Oh, ohhhhhh,” Larch said, and then he threw his head back and laughed. The sound was loud, clear, and childish, and it caught them all off guard. “I’m sorry,” he said, eventually. “With all this evidence, I didn’t realize my guilt was still somehow in question. I was talking about the cult thing. I definitely never worshiped any demons, but yeah, sure, I killed all those guys.”

“ _Why?_ ” someone asked in disbelief.

Larch shrugged. “Eh,” he said. “It was fun. I’ve never killed anyone with a gun before. I’m surprisingly good at it.”

“Wait, so, you’ve killed people in other ways, before?”

“Sure,” he said. “I prefer doing it with my bare hands. Yeah, it gets pretty messy, but there’s nothing quite like a hands-on experience. I’ve also used knives, baseball bats, random blunt instruments and furniture, pieces of string, strangled a woman with her own hair once, scissors, live mice, power tools, musical instruments, oh, and barbed wire. That was a fun one…”

“Objection,” said the prosecutor. “This has… absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand. If the defendant has actually done what he claims to have done, that is another case. Or, a lot of other cases, as it is. It can be dealt with later. Now, I think we should get back to the actual case of actual multiple homicide we’re dealing with, yes?”

The defence attorney scooted as far away from his client as possible, and then he put his head back down in his hands and gave up. Larch kept grinning.

\---

The rest of the case was settled relatively easily, ending in a sentence of several lifetimes in a high-security prison, for which he was sent off later that very day.

He kept a chipper attitude, even as they stripped him of the rest of his belongings.

“You know,” he said, as he pulled his shirt over his head, “I’ve never been to jail before. That’ll be an interesting experience.”

“Don’t worry,” one of the guards said. “I don’t think it’ll be too interesting. Mind-numbing, is a description we hear a lot.”

Tyrone smirked. “Ah well, we’ll see about that.”

The guard had no idea what it was about that smile that made him want to remove the new prisoner from the face of the earth, but it lead to him pulling the man along rather harshly once he had gotten his prisoner’s uniform on. The fact that Tyrone seemed to take to the rough treatment easily, only annoyed him further.

They led him down a hallway until they reached a cell, which they unlocked. A voice from inside made a questioning sound.

“New cellmate, David,” one of the guards said. Then he turned to Tyrone, “New guy, this is David Halver, self-declared baddest motherfucker in West Side prison, he’s going to be your cellmate for now. David, this is Tyrone Larch. Show him the ropes, yeah?”

The guard gave him a nasty smile before he closed the door and left, which was matched by the smile on the face of David, who stood more than a head taller than Tyrone.

“Hi!” Tyrone said, and smiled back.

\---

The last thing the prison warden expected early next morning was to have David Halver request to see him on the subject of changing his cell. He could honestly say that he had never seen the man so shaken before in his life.

“I don’t care where or with who,” David said, “put me in solitary, even, just get me away from that maniac, please!”

The warden fixed the paperwork for the cell transfer, and spent the rest of the day worrying. Not that he should have. It did nothing to stop the events that unfolded from there.

Though at this point in time, Tyrone Larch was doing nothing worse than getting questionable food from the cafeteria. Around him as he sat down to chew on it, people were grumbling.

“God,” the guy opposite him said. “Mystery meat again? Does anyone even know what’s in this?”

“I could probably figure it out,” Tyrone said.

“Oh yeah? How?”

“Eh,” he shrugged, “I’ve a good sense of taste. Let’s see…” He took a bite of the so-called mystery meat and waved his fork around contemplatingly. “Okay, there’s a lot of mink in here, and definitely a bit of frog, though it’s mostly rat, I think. Maybe some seagull. And oh, nice! Someone’s lost a finger in here!”

Tyrone chewed on happily, while most of the people who had heard him abandoned their cutlery, and one man turned around on the bench to throw up. The sound of dropped cutlery and gagging spread through the room at about the speed of gossip, which is usually slightly faster than the speed of sound.

Eventually it also reached a little group of people in a corner, but it mattered very little, because they were all too distracted to think about touching their food.

At this point in history in this particular country, any connection with demons was highly illegal. Even teaching people to stay away from them could get you in trouble, and something like active demon worship was always punished with a prison sentence, which is how this little group of Circle followers had ended up in West Side despite being reasonably law-abiding and polite people. They were generally regarded by both inmates and guards to be strange, but likeable. Now, they were all staring directly at the centre of the gag-wave.

One of them got up and nervously walked across the room to stop beside Tyrone. He whispered something in his ear, and Tyrone tilted his head for a second, nodded, whispered something back, and patted the man on the back and sent him back to his table.

As the lunch-hour went on, people started complaining loudly about the food, and if in the commotion Tyrone got up and looked around with the expression of a cat perched on an aquarium. No one noticed.

There were people in this place who had been there for many years. There were members of rival gangs, people who had tried to kill each other on the streets before being caught for something or other. There was testosterone and boredom and stress, and Tyrone recognized it as the delightful time bomb it was. Maybe it needed some assembly before it would work at full power, but he was more than ready to put in that work, so he fired up some of his own subtle resources and started talking.

He did not say much. A few words here, a carefully disguised insult there, a few insinuations and implications, all said to the right people at the right time. It did nothing now, but he could practically smell the ever-present tensions rising, and he left the cafeteria that day with a full stomach and the sense of a job well begun.

\---

The second cellmate was a convicted child molester. It did not end well.

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?” the warden asked the guard on duty.

“I meant what I said. Gone. The cameras show him entering the room, but never leaving it, and there isn’t any trace of the man in the cell. Larch insists he never arrived in the first place, and I’d almost be inclined to believe him if the cameras didn’t say otherwise. I don’t know what to think.”

The warden sighed, ordered an investigation, and settled down to worry more.

Meanwhile, Tyrone was tending to his ticking time bomb in the cafeteria, tuning tensions and honing hostilities, carefully making sure no one connected their agitated state of mind to him, and somewhere, a certain prisoner brought his own plans to fruition.

The problem with throwing all the demon worshipers into the same place is that sooner or later, one of them will try summoning a demon, and that was exactly what happened. Luckily for everyone, it was quickly discovered and the man was taken care of, but it did lead to yet another meeting in the warden’s office.

“And how exactly did this happen?” he asked. “Don’t we have a sensor system in place to catch this kind of activity long before they can get close to an actual summoning?”

“Yes we do,” the guard said. “I was just about to call the technician to come take a look at it, see if she can’t see what’s gone wrong.”

“Good. Do. We were lucky you got there before the summoning completed this time.”

The guard looked immensely uncomfortable.

“… You did get there in time, right?”

“Well,” the guard said. “Not exactly. Actually, we got there just as the summoning finished. The prisoner started this rant about how we couldn’t hold him now or somesuch, but the demon, it paused, and then it sort of sniffed at the air for a bit, and then… if I didn’t know better, I’d say it looked terrified, and then it left, just like that.”

The warden looked at the guard for a long time. He opened his mouth to say something, and then he changed his mind and said instead, “Just get the damned system back online, will you?”

The technician showed up just an hour later, and she had no better answers to anything. As far as she could tell, she said, the system worked exactly as it should, except it seemed that something was supressing it. She would look into it further, she said, but for now, they would have to deal with things the old-fashioned way, so they ordered a thorough search of every cell, as a precaution.

That was not a smooth undertaking. For some reason, attitudes were worse than ever, and just going through each room once with no fights breaking out was exhausting, which was why, when they got to Larch’s cell and it had _curtains_ , the guard with the keys closed the door again, pinched the bridge of his nose and asked, “Did you guys see that too, or am I just too tired?”

The rest of them nodded, and he opened the door again and yep, curtains. There were also floral sheets on the beds instead of the usual white ones, and a cosy chair with a book open on the armrest in a corner. Larch himself stood by the side table under the window, watering a potted plant. He was supposed to have none of those things.

“Larch,” the guard said. “Is that marijuana?”

Larch put down the watering can and looked up, then he looked down at the plant.

“Yup,” he said.

“Where the fuck did you get that.”

“Around.”

“What do you even want it for?”

“Ambiance,” he said, and for whatever reason, they believed him.

“This is against so many regulations,” the guard said, and even as he said it, he realized that Larch’s uniform had a row of buttons instead of a zipper, and was perhaps a slightly more tasteful shade of red than the regular orange.

“Yeah?” Larch tilted his head. “So is murdering twenty-seven people. How did you think I got here in the first place?”

They should have done something. They should have gotten rid of the innocent looking houseplant, or the inexplicable chair, but no. They were just going through looking for items that could be used for demonic summoning, and while they had absolutely no idea what they were looking at, they knew this was not it, and they honestly did not know how to deal with this in the first place. So they left it alone.

\---

As if the warden needed any more confusing headaches, he got a message late that night with orders from above that every member of the Circle was to be transferred to a minimum-security prison the morning of the next day.

While he had little against that particular group of people being treated like people, he would still greatly appreciate knowing why it was happening.

Tyrone Larch had his room to himself that night.

\---

The next day was the day everything finally exploded.

Walking into the cafeteria was like walking into a wall for all the tension in the air. It was almost so one could cut it with a knife, and in this case, the saying was very nearly literal.

The only person in the room who was even a little relaxed was Tyrone, who walked up the line to get his ‘food’, walked to a table to sit down, and stuck out a leg just in time to trip a passing gang-member.

The man shouted a curse, and a five- or six-step chain reaction later, he was in the middle of a cafeteria-wide brawl.

Tyrone placed himself at a table in the back of the room and observed with a gleeful smile, sometimes handing out shivs to the people who got close to him, and then patting them on the back and sending them back into the fray.

It took the guards over three hours to calm everything back down.

\---

In hindsight, it was hard to explain exactly how Larch had been responsible, but they all knew he was.

Sure, he was one of the few to stay out of the fighting altogether, and sure, the shivs he was reportedly handing out had vanished, but the wounds they left behind had not, and in either case, the warden had been looking for an excuse to put Larch in solitary confinement for a while.

Maybe he imagined it would help.

It did not help.

In fact, it seemed to make things worse.

\---

Several people choked on their drinks when Tyrone Larch casually walked into the cafeteria the next day.

He stood out like a beacon, partially because of the way the crowd parted around him, and partially because of what he was wearing. It was still recognizable as the standard prisoner’s uniform, but the colour was adjusted up to a very tasteful red, and it seemed to have been tailored to actually fit properly.

The guards let him finish his lunch before they approached him.

“Larch,” they said, “come on, we need to escort you back to your cell.”

Larch looked up with a cheerful smile. “Okay,” he said, and then they flanked him and took him away.

They had to pass through three locked doors on their way to his cell. The last door opened to a plain, white room with little more in it than a simple bed. Tyrone Larch was relaxing on that bed, calmly reading a book he was not supposed to have. As the door opened, he looked up at the closest guard.

“Was there anything you needed?” he asked.

The guard looked behind him at the empty space Larch had occupied a second ago, and said, “Uh. I don’t- huh?”

“Alright then,” Larch smiled, “Nice of you to drop by. Have a good day.”

They closed the door.

It happened three more times that day.

\---

Paradoxically, one of the most disturbing things about the next day was that he only broke out of his cell once.

Sure, that one involved him leaving the showers with different clothes than he had on when he entered them. In addition to the revelation that his isolation cell had somehow become furnished with floral prints and yet another questionable potted plant, but it still seemed like too little.

It was almost a relief for the evening guard to hear a soft knocking and a voice going, “I’m sorry, I stayed out too late, can you let me back in?” Because that meant that the freak had at least been doing something weird that day.

The guard spent a moment wishing he could leave him out there in good conscience before he sighed and let him in. His job was to keep dangerous people out of society, and he could at least pretend to try.

He still felt he had to ask.

“Okay, I give up,” the guard said, as he walked Larch back to his cell, again. “How did you get out?”

“Through the door?” Larch said.

“The door is locked.”

“So I used the key.”

“You- what?”

And Larch did indeed pull a key out of his pocket. A key the guard recognized as one that should be hanging in the warden’s office.

The guard blinked a few times, and decided not to say anything else. Instead, he took the key, locked Larch back into his cell, and left for the warden’s office.

The warden was still there, and was barely surprised through his headache by the guard’s explanation.

“Well,” he said. “Let’s put that back where it belongs, then.”

And then he opened the key closet. The key hung exactly where it was supposed to.

“Then what is this?” asked the guard, and raised his hand holding the key he had gotten from Larch.

“That’s a banana on a string,” said the warden.

It was.

They both stared at the sad, hanging fruit for a while, and then the warden looked at the guard and said, “That’s it. I’m calling a demonologist.”

\---

The demonologist came in early next morning, carrying a set of strange instruments, which she consulted several times on the way down to Larch’s cell. Whatever results they gave her, they obviously puzzled her.

Not that it was half as puzzling as what they found in the cell.

They opened the cell door to see sunlight streaming in through the window on the wall. Which was strange because it was raining outside and they were twenty feet underground. The window also faced a rather idyllic meadow, which was like nothing one could find within a hundred miles of West Side, and the sheep grazing on said meadow were like nothing one could find within ten thousand miles of West Side.

Larch himself sat in the cosy, floral print chair reading a book in a language no one present could decipher. He smoothly marked his place and got up when they came in.

The demonologist ran one of her instruments over him until it beeped, looked at the display, and furrowed her brows in concerned confusion. Then she did it again.

After that came back with the same result, she got out another instrument and checked him out quite thoroughly. Then she stepped back.

“Well,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about him summoning a demon. That would be kind of redundant.”

“What do you mean?” asked the closest guard.

“He _is_ a demon,” was all she said.

Tyrone grinned.

Every single occult alarm in the building went off at once.

“This was fun, guys,” Tyrone said, as the screaming started in the distance, “but it seems like playtime’s over, so I suppose I have to leave. You have a nice day. I’ll come visit you some time if I feel like it.”

And then he was gone, along with his book and the view from the window. The window stayed, though, now showing some kind of grey void.

They really, really hoped he would never feel like visiting.


	39. The Feeling of Infatuation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, I was originally planning to write something long and dramatic for the ficathon, and then life happened, and, well...  
> At least you get this.
> 
> In which Elisha has a list of some of her many, many ill-advised choices.

May. 5 years old. 

Elisha knows what dating is. Or, she thinks she does, and since she’s never wrong about anything, she must be right. Dating is that thing with the true love and the kissing and being lavished with really sweet gifts by the coolest boys. It’s the pink beautiful pictures she sees in cartoons and picture books and on the covers of those books her mother won’t read for her. It’s what all the big girls do and she wants it so much.

The first boy she dates is named Adrian, and they’re definitely dating, even though he only agreed because she said they could share candy, and though she doesn’t even like him that much, and though they both forget about it after a few days. She does get him to kiss her, and Lena says that means they’re married now, so it must be right.

 

September – December. 11 years old.

It’s her birthday and she has to spend it at school, which is terrible up until the point Frederick from the other class hands her a bunch of wildflowers, and after that it’s actually kinda nice. They don’t talk too much, mostly make out in front of their respective classmates whenever they can the next few weeks. Elisha has always liked showing off, though she never thinks of it like that. She has something she enjoys so she flaunts it.

\---

Some months later, Frederick breaks up with her over text message. He says he’s grown tired of her. She’s pissed off thoroughly, and spends a lot of Christmas break ranting about it at her friends through the phone, at Uncle B, and even her parents a little, if just a little bit. She’s outraged at the pure nerve, offended at the dismissal, and inwardly delighted at the chance to be justifiably angry.

She never really misses him. As she grows older, she realizes that she always cared more for the feeling of infatuation than for the boys on the other end.

 

April – July. 14 years old.

She’s the one who asks Nemuel out. She sees him, falls in love, and two days later they’re dating, because it really is that easy, isn’t it? Because if she wants something, why shouldn’t she get it? Because if she likes someone, why shouldn’t they be perfect? Dating is what people do, what they’re supposed to be doing, and she sees no reason to doubt her choices.

\---

He is cheating on her. He kisses another girl behind the school building, and she breaks up with him immediately, and she is appropriately outraged, because that is what you’re supposed to be. Because love is blind, right? It’s hardly her fault if she didn’t expect it.

 

February. 15 years old.

Her relationship with Teodor is exciting and short-lived. There’s something thrilling about it, maybe in the way he doesn’t want to tell anyone, or in the way they ‘borrow’ his parents’ car to drive to hidden places to make out. She wonders later, after the customary shouting and bitch slapping, if she should have realized. He wasn’t strictly cheating on her of course, because he was cheating on someone else with her. She stays friends with Jeanne for a few years, so at least something good comes from it.

And really, why should they blame themselves? He was the one who was a prick, and no one can expect them to constantly look out for prickishness.

 

July – August. 15 years old.

She and Daniel get together through mutual attraction. He’s the alpha-male type, she’s one of the prettiest girls in school, it was bound to happen.

\---

He blows off the third date in a row because he has something important to do. It annoys her, but hey, if it’s really important, she shouldn’t judge.

Instead of staying at home and grumbling, she takes her uncle up on an earlier offer of his, and they go to a car race together. There’s never anything quite like a fast car to raise her spirits. It would probably work a lot better if she hadn’t seen Daniel on the spectator stands below her, and the ensuing argument makes her miss most of the race. The worst part is when he tries to break up with her, because he doesn’t want to date a girl who likes cars, it’s not girly enough (as if she isn’t the girliest person he knows), and she retaliates by smacking him down five steps of the stands with her purse and shouting that you can’t break up with someone who isn’t dating you anymore.

To add insult to injury, her favourite car ends up in a six-car pileup and she doesn’t even get to see.

 

September. 15 years old. – April. 16 years old.

Chad asks her to go to the homecoming dance with him, and she happily agrees. Why would she not? Chad is good-looking, popular, and he knows how to treat a woman. She has a great time on the dance, and just as good a time on their later dates, and he never gives her a reason to say no to the thrill of infatuation.

\---

Catching him cheating on her is one thing. Catching him cheating on her with a guy is another. Listening to him begging her not to tell anyone because his friends would kill him makes it clear enough that he’d never really liked her to begin with. He’ll probably feel the slap she administers for several days, but she does keep the secret, if nothing else then because she knows his friends and she thinks he might not be exaggerating.

 

March – June. 17 years old.

Her relationship with Alex feels different, more adult than her earlier ones. It probably has something to do with him being older than her by a few years. Maybe a few more than most people are entirely comfortable with, but why should that matter? She’s still sure that love really is the only necessary thing in a relationship, and she knows she loves him, and she’s sure he loves her too. He tells her all the time, and he makes it obvious that he really is attracted to her. She enjoys the attention, she enjoys the gifts he gives her, and she even enjoys passing a certain milestone or two with him, even if the actual experience is underwhelming at most.

\---

It takes her a while to realize how secretive he is about their relationship. He’s a lot subtler about it than Teodor was, and if she was someone else she might not notice at all, but eventually she recognizes the pattern and decides to investigate. She doesn’t know what she’ll find, but if there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s navigating search engines, social media, gossip, and people to find what she’s looking for, and it takes her less than a week to find five other girls who claim to be dating him.

They meet up, compare evidence, schedules and pictures and experiences, gather more evidence, formulate a plan, and then they let it all loose at once.

Social media is merciless.

Alex deletes every account he has anywhere within two days, but the girls doubt he will ever truly be able to outrun the reputation.

One of the girls get Elisha a job at the local hairdressing salon.

 

August. 17 years old. – November. 18 years old.

Dennis is gorgeous. His family has some sort of higher spirit ancestry, and it shows on his face, in his voice, in the way he presents himself to the world with absolute confidence, as if he already knows how it should shape itself around him. She falls for him like her blood’s on fire, her skin tingles every time she’s near him, and she screeches into her pillow the night he says he’ll go out with her. It’s been years since the last time she was this much in love.

\---

There’s no big event to mark their break-up, no shouting match or great betrayal to precede it. He just takes her just as much for granted as he does everything else, and she could deal with that if she was getting something from it, but she isn’t. They go on dates, they hold hands, they tell people they’re together, but there’s nothing else between them. She likes being in love, and she likes him, but she’s grown up a little, and she wants a little more than just someone pretty to kiss.

So she breaks up with him, and maybe she secretly enjoys the fact that for the first time since she met him, he seems genuinely shocked.

 

March – May. 18 years old.

Kenny is the only guy who works at the hairdressing salon. She is not stupid enough to think he is anything but amazingly brave, doing that in a town like theirs, not to mention he dresses well, keeps his hair immaculate at all times, and shares actual major interests with her. They become friends quickly, and no one is surprised when Elisha falls for him. Some people are a little surprised when he likes her back.

\---

Romance is very much frowned upon in the workplace, so they keep quiet about it. Because of this very good reason not to announce their relationship, it doesn’t make her suspicious. Of all her boyfriends this far, Kenny is the one she talks to the most, the one she likes the best as a friend, which is part of why she feels so betrayed when he goes the path of four of the previous ones and cheats on her. He’s not even very creative about it.

He is brave enough to show up to work the next day, despite the black eye, and the next few months at the salon are marked by a carefully hidden, biting chill.

 

November – January. 19 years old.

Martin has more confidence than anyone she’s ever met. He says exactly what he feels like saying to anyone at all times, no matter how embarrassing anyone else would have found it. Sometimes, he makes her laugh until she cries, and sometimes he just hugs her close and kisses her with a smile on his lips, and she loves him.

\---

He isn’t cheating on her.

He hasn’t hurt her, or betrayed her, or even lied to her, not really.

No. It’s drugs. Of course it’s drugs. Half the town is doing drugs of some sort so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does, and she can’t believe she couldn’t see it, couldn’t see he was that kind of person. It’s not like he ever even tries to hide it, so why couldn’t she see?

She never speaks to him again.

 

July – August. 20 years old.

It is midsummer and Elisha meets Lasse at a party at a mutual acquaintance’s place. They’re both pretty drunk, but they chat, he asks for her number, and she gives it to him. The next morning, she wakes up with a headache and several very drunk texts from a contact designated “lasiee.” on her phone. They get together.

\---

She finds an old and beat-up car in Uncle B’s garage. When Lasse shows he doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself, it proves its worth by running him up a tree. Elisha deletes “lasiee.” from her contacts list, but she keeps The Car.

 

December. 21 years old. – February. 22 years old.

Charlie is the best guy she’s dated yet, in several ways. She knows how many girls have been pining after him, knows how many guys look up to him, and out of everyone, he picked her. She is beside herself with joy. It’s great. They match. He understands her, and she understands him in turn. They fit together like two halves of a puzzle, and she is so very much in love with him.

She loves the way his hair looks after waking up, the way he smiles, the way he throws an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close whenever they walk together like he wants only to keep her to himself, and she is so very, very happy.

\---

It’s been over a year, and she doesn’t smile anymore. The arm across her shoulders doesn’t really make her feel warm and tingly anymore, and she is so tired of being scared, so tired of feeling trapped.

They find him three miles down the river, and something loosens in her. Something has changed, and she doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to think about any of it. She just wants it all to go back to normal, but she knows she can’t do it here.

 

September. 23 years old.

Her 23rd birthday is spent packing all her belongings into the back seat of The Car. She would have used the trunk, but she still isn’t sure what she’ll find in there when she opens it. Either way, she has few enough belongings that the back seat is enough. Most of what’s in her room belongs to her parents. Her wardrobe takes up at least half of the things she does bring.

Speaking of her parents, they say whatever goodbyes they feel the need to say and let her go. Uncle B spends a little more time on it, even crying a little as he hugs her and asks if she’s really sure she wants to go, and Elisha answers that yes, of course she is. It always had to be like this. And then she leaves, hoping in a way that she’s leaving her past behind with the town.

She meets a group of people on the way, whose names and faces she only remembers because she never forgets a name. It’s quite an interesting meeting, true, but she doesn’t have the faintest inkling of the effect it will eventually have on her life.

 

March. 23 years old.

She isn’t in love with Thomas.

Why would she be? He’s about as far from her type as it’s possible to get.

She isn’t in love with him at all, and she would know, she has been in love a lot of times, and that might be why she can step back and think.

She knows how it feels to be in love and to run with it, she loves that feeling, and she knows what happens when she does. She has tried, again and again and again, and she knows better than anyone how love can make one blind.

Thomas, she can see clearly, without the rose-tinted fog of infatuation, and she does like what she sees.

She’s tired of making stupid choices. She’s tired of being hurt and betrayed. She’s tired of being scared of being led astray by her own emotions again.

She’s tired of being alone.

So she says yes.

Turns out, being in love is not a prerequisite for love.


	40. Little Isabelle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny, tiny chapter, about tiny but important things.

Less than two days old, Isabelle was still young enough that he could smell Elisha’s blood on her. By his experience, the smell would fade after a few more bath times, but as of yet, the small body in his arms still smelled of newness and her mother’s blood.

Her parents were upstairs, passed out in bed after getting home from the hospital, having handed the baby over to him because they were too tired to care and he had the advantage of not needing sleep. Her older sister…

Agatha padded around the couch on small feet and stared solemnly at the sleeping shape in his arms. He was almost too engrossed in the bliss of newborn life, in the delight in counting tiny heartbeats and unpractised breaths to notice her, especially when she was this quiet, but she drew his attention readily.

“Are you sure she’s a whole person?” she asked, looking down at her little sister with worry.

“Yes,” Dipper smiled. “She has all the necessary parts. I’m sure of it.”

“But she’s so tiny!” Agatha insisted, instinctively careful to keep her voice down around the sleeping baby.

Dipper laughed, just as quietly. “So were you when you were that age. You were even a little bit smaller, but you grew up, didn’t you? Isabelle will grow up too, really fast, so don’t worry.”

Agatha nodded slowly, but she still stood unmoving, biting her lip and staring at her sister.

Taking pity on her, Dipper asked, “Do you want to hold her?”

Agatha looked up with what could only be described as horror, her little mouth hanging open. She swallowed, and then mumbled in a voice too low for a normal human to easily hear, “But what if she breaks.”

Dipper tried not to laugh again, but his smile hurt for how fond he was of these children, how much he would do to keep them safe. “She won’t break,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it. I won’t let anything happen to either of you while I’m around, okay?”

He carefully moved Isabelle over to one arm so he could pat the couch beside him, beckoning Agatha to sit. She did, but kept her shoulders hiked up and her hands between her legs.

“But I break things all the time,” she mumbled.

Dipper moved off the couch and crouched in front of her, putting his free hand on her shoulder. “Agatha,” he said, “it’s okay. When you break things, it’s because you’re careless, and that’s not good, but it’s not a big problem either, it’s just a thing that happens. I don’t believe you’ll be careless with your sister. Trust me. She won’t break. Okay?”

Agatha relaxed a little, and nodded.

“Do you want to hold her?” he asked again.

She nodded again, a little more enthusiastically, and he carefully passed her the sleeping baby. She held her hands out and listened seriously and intently as he showed her how to hold her, and then she sat there with her tiny sister on her lap, staring reverently, a smile on her lips. Isabelle fussed and wiggled just a bit, but did not wake up.

They sat there for a while, just watching, before Dipper asked, “What do you think?”

Agatha considered the question. “…I think she’s really important,” she said.

Dipper smiled and thought, as he looked at the two girls he had quietly sworn to protect, that Agatha really did take after her parents.

Her logic was impeccable.


	41. TAUwarts origin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, after getting through a truly epic writers block, I can tentatively say that I'M BACK, BABY!  
> Back with a prequel to [this,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8717590/chapters/20272984) that is, ten thousand words of self-indulgent Hogwarts AU. Deal with it. There might be more later.

At a corner table of the outdoors section of a small London café one summer afternoon relatively soon after the turn of the millennium, a creature of incomprehensible power haphazardly folded into the shape of a young man approximately two decades of age sat reading a newspaper in which the pictures moved. He talked as he read. An outside observer might think he talked to himself, and maybe he did.

“Wizards,” he muttered, turning a page apathetically. “Such boring, unchanging creatures. Stuck centuries in the past of everyone else.”

_But things have been changing recently, haven’t they? It’s the 21th century. With the advent of the internet, you know muggle-borns won’t accept their antiquated practices as superior much longer. Not with the way the world is changing. And the world is changing. Things are starting to get more interesting._

He turned another page and paused at a headline. A small smile crossed his face.

“Maybe, maybe. I nothing else it could be interesting to watch the stubborn old buggers be forced to confront the world progressing.”

_Considering all their spells are still developed on principles that reject modern technology as a matter of nature. It will be a tough transition._

His smile widened as he read the article. “They’d have to finally admit that theirs is not the only kind of magic. Yes, that might be interesting to see. Maybe I _do_ want to give them that push. A wizard, huh…”

 _You have been wanting to try this for a while_.

A woman’s voice cut through his muttering. “About time, isn’t it?”

He looked up from the paper to see the owner of the voice stand by his table with a new cup of tea and a paper of her own. Her skin was lightly coloured and her hair was long and unwieldy, tied back to keep out of her face.

He put the paper down without closing it, displaying the title, ‘New Law Passes! The Definition of Human Redefined?’

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a victory for basic logic, sure, but as far as I’m aware, there doesn’t exist anyone yet who will actually be affected by this one.”

“That’s not the point!” she said. Then she smiled a little sheepishly. “I’m sorry, may I sit down? I should’ve asked.”

He gestured for her to sit and she did. “Then what is the point?” he asked.

“Well… it’s a first step. It seems like such a small thing, right? It’s just saying that anything that is indistinguishable from a human in any way must be treated as a human, and that’s not a difficult thing to agree with, especially since no homunculi that good have ever been created, but it’s about the change in attitudes.”

He sat back with an expression of polite curiosity and tilted his head as she took a deep breath to continue.

“It’s not that far, mentally, from ‘you don’t need human parents to be human’ to ‘you don’t need to be human to have human rights’. Not really, not if we play it right, and that’s really what we’re trying to do, right? Make sure what you’re allowed to do and what people are allowed to do to you depends on your capacity for understanding and not whether you belong to this particular species. This is the first step towards that, and we can build on it.”

He picked up his own cup and smiled into it, while she had set her down to gesture. “I admit I wouldn’t mind human rights,” he said.

She froze and closed her mouth with a click. “Oh,” she said, and instinctively ran her eyes over him.

His smile widened. “You couldn’t tell, can you.”

“Ah, no I-” she said, faltering. “I’m sorry, I was just surprised. Do you mind if I ask?”

He gestured for her to continue with a wave of his hand.

“Werewolf?” she asked tentatively.

“Really,” he said. “You of all people should know werewolves are just as human as the rest of you.”

“Well, not all people think so,” she said with an apologetic smile. She fidgeted with her cup on the table, and suddenly she was not quite sure where to look. She might have been staring a bit. “I’m sorry, I just- I honestly can’t tell, and I can’t think of any non-humans that can pass that convincingly.”

He took a sip from his cup and chuckled. “I’m not surprised. There’s more between heaven and earth than you wizards are aware of.”

“Oh,” she said, and went back to studying him.

He gave her a strange feeling. It was like unrest, made her fidget on her chair as if she should be moving, walking away. His eyes, following her every movement, were filled with amusement. Every part of him looked utterly human, and she could not quite understand what about him made her so convinced he was telling the truth. It took her a minute to realize he was not blinking.

“Technically,” she said with a dismissive snort, trying to calm herself down a little. “I’m a witch, not a wizard.”

His amused smile stayed the same, but he raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference?”

“Well, I’m female, for one.”

“Still can’t see a difference,” he said, draining his cup.

She paused for a moment. “Was that some kind of insult?” she asked.

He laughed, and closed his eyes as he did so, which made him look a smidge more human. “It was mostly a comment on human gender norms,” he said, “but if you want to know the truth, ‘witch’ was a word wizards stole some eighteen hundred years ago when they didn’t want their women to be called the same as themselves anymore.”

“Stole from who?” the woman asked, blinking.

“The witches, obviously,” he replied with a grin.

She gave him a dry look.

His grin widened before he continued. “Again I’m not surprised. There weren’t many of them in the first place before your predecessors exterminated them, and they weren’t quite as… loud… as you tend to be. It wasn’t too difficult for them to hide the records of their actions from history.”

A minute or three passed in horrified silence. Well, she was horrified. She had a feeling that if anything could horrify him, she did never, ever want to see it. She thought. He turned a page in his newspaper and chuckled at a notice in the margin.

“If you don’t mind,” she said, eventually. “How do _you_ know this, if they erased it so well?”

“Hm?” he looked back up. “I was there. It was worth seeing.”

“Oh,” she said again, then, quieter, “I imagine you don’t have the best impression of wizards, huh?”

He shrugged. “Eh, it’s human nature. You’ve been getting a lot better lately.” He indicated the article that had prompted her into approaching him in the first place. “I can’t really dislike you too much when you give me opportunities like this.”

“Uh-huh?” she said. Her hands were shaking. She forced them flat on the table. “What opportunity, exactly?”

“There doesn’t exist anyone for this law to apply to… yet. Right?”

He grinned sharply. As she processed the implications of his statement, he neatly folded up his paper and put it down on the table. Then he got up.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you, Ma-am. I enjoyed our conversation, but if you don’t mind, I have places to be.”

She could only nod dumbly at him, and then he was gone.

It took her a few moments to convince herself that he had in fact been there. The newspaper folded up on the table beside the empty cup, along with her own nearly untouched cup indicating a conversation partner proved it.

It just _felt_ like he had never been there.

One moment he was, and another he was gone, the moment in-between conspicuously missing.

She drew a deep breath and drank her cooling tea.

She had a lot of thinking to do. There was research to be done, things to set in motion. The world was moving and she wanted to be one of the people moving it.

She had a strange feeling they would all have to be ready to run sometime soon.

\---

The creature shed his disguise once he came into the confines of his own home. Still, he snickered.

“Ah, that was hysterical,” he said to himself and whoever else might be listening. “I’ll never get tired of doing that to people.”

_She did stop talking very quickly._

The creature laughed at that for a few more minutes before he calmed down. “Well,” he said. “If I’ve decided to do this I might as well get started.”

A few movements were made in a dimension any human present would have trouble processing, and a bright point of light started growing in the middle of the space. The creature fuzzed at it and poked at it as it grew. Soon it faded, losing the glow to reveal a red, fleshy lump, and still it grew.

It started taking shape, and move around a little under its own power, and the creature grinned and hummed a melody that shore through the fabric of sanity with a single piercing note. He was happy with himself. The lump growing, floating in the air did not seem to notice.

It settled, eventually, pushing at the membranes confining it with small, chubby hands, and the creature reached up with a pair of hands of his own, momentarily almost human-like, and caught it as it ripped free.

“Hello there, little one,” the creature said.

“Nyah!” said the baby.

The next grin the creature gave once again had a veneer of humanity, if a flimsier one than he had shown the woman at the café.

“You’re going to need someone with more specific human experience than I have, aren’t you?” he asked the baby.

The baby sucked its thumb in reply.

The creature considered this. “Five years, maybe?” he wondered, and then his human shell solidified, and at once he was a child, barely big enough to hold the baby in his arms. Another adjustment and they stood on the floor of a small, empty apartment.

_You have a lot of hard work ahead of you._

The child looked down at the baby he held and smiled. “Hard, maybe,” he said, “but I bet it’ll be interesting.”

\---

A few years later, a certain woman walked down a block of apartment buildings. This was not the first home she had visited this week, and it would not be the last, but it was important work, so she could deal with being a little tired.

Double-checking the address, she walked up to an apartment on the third floor and knocked on the door.

A boy of about eleven years opened it, and something about him make her pause for a couple seconds before she smiled at him. “Hello,” she said. “Are you Tyrone Evergreen?”

The boy tilted his head, looking up at her, and then smirked. “Yeah. Are you from the school?”

“Ah, yes,” she said, caught off guard. “Well, I don’t actually work for the school, normally, but this is a busy time, so they called me in to help out. Are your parents at home?”

“No,” the boy said, still smirking. Then he opened the door all the way. “You can come in though.”

She thanked him and followed him into the apartment. He led her to a couch and then walked towards where the kitchen had to be.

“You want tea or something?” he said.

Something about the way he moved put her off. Something about his face, or in his voice. She could not quite put her finger on it, but it made it impossible for her to relax into the couch properly.

A quick glance around the apartment revealed a couple of chairs and a table, frames on the wall with the default pictures from the store still in them, and a few scattered items, but it did not really look like the home of a family. It struck her as lacking something, as if it was fake, constructed by someone who almost knew what a house should look like, but who had not lived in one for any large amount of time.

“Hello?” Tyrone said, and she realized she had not answered his question.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you repeat that, you think?”

Instead of complying, he studied her for a few seconds. “What are you worrying about?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I thought maybe you look a little familiar. Have we met before?”

She said it with a joking smile, so when he grinned and said, “Sure,” it took her by surprise. “Six years ago, at a café a few miles south of here. You were excited about legal reforms and I was reading a newspaper.”

A cold chill ran down her spine as she remembered, and it took her half a minute to remember how to breathe. “Oh,” she said, and he grinned.

“So, do you want tea?” he asked.

“I think I might want a drink,” she muttered.

He laughed and walked into the kitchen. “Oh please, I’m eleven. Do you really think I have access to alcohol?” he said as he pulled a bottle of gin out of a cupboard.

A few minutes later, they were situated on opposite sides of the living room table, with her on the couch and him on a cosy chair. She held a glass of gin and he had a cup of tea.

“So,” she said, voice shaking. She coughed a bit and tried again. “So, I assume you know why I’m here?”

“I’m on the lists for the school and they don’t have any records of my parents,” he confirmed, “so they sent someone to have a chat and make sure we know all the important parts.”

She nodded, then she asked, “Can I ask, how did you even get on the list? You’re not… really… a child, right?”

“Right, well, I’m not gonna claim it was easy,” he said, adjusting his position. “Unless anything else is specified, the Hogwarts registry is enchanted to find and record any child with magical ability within a fairly large range. All I had to do was to make myself similar enough to a wizard child for it to notice me, which was tricky, but not impossible.”

“I see,” she said. “You were right, by the way. About the witches.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You found records of it?”

“I’m not gonna claim it was easy,” she said with a small smile. “it was a long time ago, as you said, and while it was buried pretty deep, no one really cared about hiding it anymore. You gave me a date to start looking for, so a bit of digging through the Ministry’s archived gave me enough to confirm it.”

“Colour me impressed,” he said, and took a drink from his cup.

She had a taste of her own glass, because she had a strong feeling she was going to need it, and that she was going to need something stronger once she got home.

Before either of them said anything else, a small shape ran up to Tyrone’s chair. A shape that on closer investigation was actually a small child. The child whispered something to Tyrone, and Tyrone said something back. The woman’s breathing stalled again as she realized what was going on.

“Ah,” she said. “About six years old?”

The child looked at her and grinned, adorably and far more human than his… family member ever had. “Yeah!” he said.

“Alvie?” Tyrone said, ruffling the kid’s hair. “Do you mind leaving us alone to talk for a bit? There’s cookies in the closet if you want.”

“Okay!” the kid said, and then he ran off, beaming.

The woman stared after him. “You really did,” she said.

“I did,” he replied. “He’s on the list too, in case you’re wondering. I didn’t need any tricks to manage that, it just found him in the usual way.”

She looked back at the… child, in the chair, and took a long sip from her glass. “This is why you’re doing this, isn’t it? For the kid?”

“Oh, you _are_ smart,” he said, grinning. “Yes. He’s my son, after all. I owe him that much.”

She almost laughed. “That’s a little disconcerting to hear from an eleven-year-old, you know,” she said.

The man sitting in the chair across from her was at least halfway through his twenties. She was confused for several seconds before she caught on to what had happened, and after that, the knots her brain tied itself into by trying to remember what had just happened were painfully familiar.

She closed her eyes. “Okay just… stop. Please. Stop doing that.”

When she opened her eyes, he was eleven again, looking at her with a smile on his face. “Okay then,” he said. “Why don’t we have the conversation you came here to have in the first place?”

She nodded, and then she paused. “Do you even need it? I mean, you have your-” No, in fact he did not. She reached into her pocket and pulled out his letter, which she should have handed him to begin with, but had gotten distracted from. She gave it to him now, and he immediately opened it and started reading. “Your list of necessary school supplies, additional information and your ticket for the train. I’m supposed to ask if you need monetary help from the school, but…”

“Yeah, money isn’t an issue,” he said without looking up from the letter.

She nodded again. “I think,” she said, “it’s safe to assume you know where to get it, and don’t need school-provided supervision?”

“Reasonably safe, yes.”

She finished her glass of gin and was grateful for the buzz calming her down. She watched him read the letter and she bit her lip in worry.

He looked almost entirely human like this, head bowed so the hair of his bangs covered his eyes. She thought he might be mouthing words as he went. Then he looked up at her.

“Was there anything else?” he asked.

She considered the question before she answered. “I think I found you in the history books,” she said. “I think I might know what you are.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really? Well now I really _am_ impressed,” he said. “My kind rarely bother with humans as it is, and it’s been ages since any of us bothered with wizards specifically.”

“There are always records,” she said. “Notices. Illustrations and mentions. Myths. Very little specific, and nothing that’s known to be fact and not just ramblings of diseased minds, but I’ve found you there.”

“And?” he asked. “What are you planning to do about it?”

She chewed her bottom lip and thought about her wording. “I don’t think I could stop you even if I wanted to, but I just need to make sure, absolutely sure, that it’s safe to let you loose in a school. You understand?”

“Of course,” he said. “I’d expect nothing less.”

“Is it _true_ that you follow agreements religiously?” she asked.

He put out his hand and tilted it back and forth to indicate ‘more or less’. “Eh. I never break a deal if I can help it, but religion doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“I see.” She thought a bit more, and then said, almost to herself, “A deal. Okay, I can do that. How about this?” She raised her voice again. “For as long as you, or anyone you’re directly connected to, attends the school, you promise not to harm anyone that belongs to or is under the protection of the school, and in return I will promise not to tell anyone about your true nature.”

He looked her in the eyes, unblinking, and finished his tea. “You’re not too bad at wording,” he said, eventually. “Anyone I’m connected to?”

“I won’t insist on that including anyone else than your…” she waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the door Alvie had left through, “creations. And possibly anyone you can expect to follow your orders if you feel like giving them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Almost literally anyone will follow my orders if I _really_ feel like giving them.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“I do, but wording is important.”

She nodded in response. “Subordinates, then. Of any kind.”

“That is fair,” he said. “And by ‘harm’, you mean what exactly?”

“Permanent, long-lasting or otherwise serious damage to mind, soul or body, caused directly or indirectly on purpose.”

“I can tell you’ve been writing laws,” he said, making her smile. “Alright, one last thing. You ‘won’t tell anyone’ means what, exactly?”

“It means I won’t act in any way so that someone other than myself is likely to learn of it. Is that acceptable?”

He leaned his head against the back of the chair, apparently thinking it over before he said, “Yes, I think so. I believe we have a deal.”

He reached his hand out to her over the table.

She hesitated for a moment before she shook it.

“Then, unless there was anything else…?” she fished, leaning forward preparing to get off the couch and really hoping there was not, so that she could leave.

“No, I think that was all,” he said, going back to perusing his letter. “Busy week?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, trying to make small talk as she got up to leave as quickly as politely possible. “Lots of muggle-borns this year. Lots of conversations. They had to call for people like me from outside the school to help, and the workload is still heavy.”

He walked her to the door. “I’m glad it happened, then. It’s been a pleasure to see you again.”

“Likewise,” she replied weakly as she walked out, and if she had drunk a little bit less gin, she never would have said the next line. “I truly hope we never meet again.”

He grinned, and closed the door.

\---

Hersheba Hutton-Ollivander had worked at her father-in-law’s wand shop for five years, and officially been his apprentice for three. She fit well into the place, tall and rail-thin as she was, with ghostly pale skin, long black hair that hung in front of her face, not quite hiding her large, too-dark eyes that blinked too little. She finished the look by keeping her nails long, her head bowed slightly, and by wearing a simple, light grey dress. Even people who had known the dusty shop for decades had trouble believing she had not always been lurking in a corner of it.

The shop fit her too. The work delighted her, the precision and, yes, the creativity of it. The way she could spend hours, days in her half-lit workroom, breathing life into something few considered alive. She took to it like fish to water, and these days she could almost always match a wizard to a wand on her own with only a little trouble. This year, her mentor had decided to stay in the upstairs workshop, hidden behind a shelf in the storage, instead of helping her at the desk, even at this time of the year, when the children passed through by the dozen to get their wands.

The flow of customers distracted her from her beloved slow and steady work, but it held its own pleasure. Her fingers tingled with warmth each time she successfully found a wand’s child, and the first time a child was chosen by a wand of her own making, her usually small smile could almost be called a grin.

She had rightful faith in her own abilities.

Yet, when the door opened to reveal a boy walking in the door hand-in-hand with a child of maybe six, she listened to the change in the hum in the air, and immediately called for her mentor to help.

“I hope you don’t mind Alvie tagging along?” the boy said, with a hand on the head of the child, who smiled innocently. “He wanted to come with me.”

“All are welcome here,” Mr Ollivander said.

The boy introduced himself as Tyrone Evergreen, and they began the process of finding a wand that wanted him.

_Spruce, phoenix feather, twelve inches, average flexibility. “It has a personality, this one. It needs confidence from its wielder, or it may betray you.”_

As the first few wands refused him, Hersheba began to worry, which was unusual. Almost no wizard matched with the first wand they tried.

_Laurel, unicorn hair, eleven and a half inches, very flexible. “A powerful, trustworthy wand. Well suited for a wizard with ambition.”_

It might have been the hum of the wands in the air. They were agitated, growing more so, slowly but surely, and as they were, so was she.

_Chesnut, unicorn hair, thirteen inches, flexible. “This wand will learn to suit its wizard. In the right hands it would be an exceptionally reliable wand.”_

The child looked at the growing pile of wands with wonder and curiosity. Evergreen absentmindedly ruffled his hair.

_Ebony, dragon heartstring, ten and a half inches, rigid. “Suited for powerful spells. This wand could decide the outcome of many duels, though relying on it above your own skills would be a mistake.”_

Evergreen himself did not seem to mind as it dragged on, though it might only feel to her as if it dragged on because of the oppressive air developing. He smiled and patiently tried wand after wand, even as one or two of them unusually began to complain with electric shocks to his handling.

_Sycamore, dragon heartstring, fourteen inches, very flexible. “This is an unusually powerful wand, ill-suited to a wizard that is anything less than exceptional. However, you must beware the sycamore. It is always looking for something new, and if you allow it to grow bored, it may combust.”_

Mr Ollivander was smiling too, a smile she recognized as one of elation. This challenge excited him, and he walked through the storage shelves as fast as his old legs could carry him, picking out increasingly unusual wands. She thought he was searching for something, triangulating from reactions from the wands that she was yet too inexperienced to sense.

_Dogwood, phoenix feather, eleven and a half inches, flexible. “This wand will choose a wizard who is likely innovative and mischievous. This one wants to have fun.”_

Then, before Evergreen could even reach out for the next wand, the familiar rush of warmth of a wand choosing its wizard rolled through the room. Mr Ollivander froze, new wand half extended. Hersheba squinted at both of them, confused, and Evergreen started, before he laughed, and looked down.

The child had grabbed the sycamore wand from the pile, and now he grinned up at them, hair standing on end. “Oops?”

“Fascinating.” Mr Ollivander leaned in close to the child and adjusted his glasses. “I have never seen a wand match a wizard under the age of nine. Indeed, I was convinced it was impossible for one so young.”

“Does that mean I can keep it?” the child asked, clutching the oversized wand to his chest and looking up at Evergreen with large eyes.

Evergreen smirked, and answered, “If you don’t break anything before we’re done here, we’ll talk.”

The child beamed at him and nodded, and Evergreen looked back at them, holding his hand out for the next wand to test.

_Hawthorn, dragon heartstring, twelve inches, unusually flexible. “A powerful wand with a contradictory nature. You might find this wand to excel or fail at tasks that should be all but identical. This is not a simple wand to use.”_

Eventually, after an increasing number of violent rejections, Mr Ollivander picked out yet another wand. This time he hesitated just a little before he handed it over.

_Hazel, unicorn hair, eleven and a half inches, rigid. “This is a sensitive wand. It will pick up on your thoughts and emotions more easily than any other, but may react badly to… extremes.”_

For the first moment after Evergreen took the wand, nothing happened. Then, with a crack, it shattered, splitting lengthwise into several long splinters and leaving a shallow, bleeding cut across Evergreen’s palm.

Hersheba drew a horrified breath at the sight, but Mr Ollivander’s face gained another level of fervent enthusiasm. Evergreen let the pieces of wood and a single fluttering unicorn hair drop to the floor, looked blankly at his hand with an eyebrow raised and absently raised it to lick the blood off his palm.

“I see,” Mr Ollivander whispered, elated. Then he started down the lines of shelves and called out, “Follow me, if you would please.”

He led them to the back of the room, through a door hidden behind a shelf and down two ladders into the sub-basement. There was a storage room here, where raw materials for wands were kept carefully contained. Further in were other things, tools of the trade that the public had never seen, failed experiments and projects that might be dangerous to use or destroy, and other things, stranger things, gathered through a long life of searching for the most potent magical materials obtainable, things that were stored because there was nothing else that could be done with them.

It was out of this collection of items that Mr Ollivander picked a simple wand box.

“When I was young,” he said, carefully running his hand over the lid of the box. “When I was… much younger than I am now, I travelled many places in search of the best materials for wandmaking.”

Evergreen listened politely, and Hersheba intently. She had heard stories beginning like this before, and she had learned to always listen, for they would not be repeated. The child with a wand a third his height in one hand clutched at his relative with the other, and he listened too.

“I don’t remember where I was, exactly,” he continued, beginning to ease the lid off the box, but making no move yet to show them its contents. “It was a forest, somewhere on the continent. Far away from any people at the time.

The room was deathly silent aside from the dry sound of Mr Ollivander’s fingers brushing over the box. Even the hum from the wands seemed distant here.

His eyes were distant too, watching the box, but, she though, watching it as it had been when he first hid it away.

“At some point,” he said, “I contracted a rather serious fever. I became delirious, convinced I was moments away from finding something for which I had been searching for years. As I was alone on my trip, with no one present to stop me, I walked out into the forest in search of it, though I was too ill to walk straight.”

Finally working the lid off the box, he paused, looking into it with a look on his face she could not decipher. Carefully, he put the lid down without taking his eyes off the contents of the box, and then he lightly ran his fingers over its rim.

“I found something, that day. When I searched again later, I could never locate it, but as I remember very little of the trip itself or what I saw when I arrived, it might be my memory failing me. What I do remember is a tree, vast enough to reach the sky over the canopy, leafless and black as soot, yet as alive as any tree can be.”

He stilled his hand and seemed to return to the present, if only a little bit.

“When I woke, from my fever dreams, some days later, there were branches in my tent unlike any I had ever seen before. After some work, I found it to be the single most difficult kind of wood I have worked with in my life, and that is still true today. It rejected any form of wand-core I tried to give it, and eventually I had to settle for making it without one, hoping the wood’s own magical qualities would be enough. Of the wands I did finish, most did not work right. They did not function as sticks, let alone wands for living creatures to touch, or use. They were cut wrong, or they lay wrong in the world, I could never figure it out. I finished, in the end, one single wand of my fever-wood, but before today I did not believe I would ever meet someone capable of wielding it.”

He showed them the contents of the box then, finally.

In it lay a single wand, black as ebony, but not, carved with shallow, intricate patterns that flowed against the grain and seemed to extend beyond the edges of it, or…

She blinked, several times, to make sure there was nothing wrong with her eyes. She heard the child give a sharp intake of breath, but she did not look.

It was hard to tell how long the wand was, or whether it lay in the middle of the box or not. It was hard to tell whether the patterns covered it completely, and if not, which parts they did cover. It seemed to move around itself without ever moving, like something out of a dream. If this was the wand that lay right in the world, she shuddered to think how thoroughly wrong the others must have been.

Mr Ollivander picked it up, sliding his fingers in from the sides of the box rather than attempting to judge where it was to take it directly. Hersheba flinched as his fingers touched the wood.

He held it out, and Evergreen considered it for a moment. Then he picked it up.

Just like that.

Like it was easy.

And all of a sudden it was. Like it fit into a track, the instant the wand touched Evergreen’s skin, it stopped looking wrong. Suddenly, it was just another wand, long and dark with intricate engravings. It fit in his hand as if it had always belonged there, and he twirled it once, traced a glowing golden line through the air, and smiled.

“It suits you,” said the child.

“Thank you, I think so too,” Evergreen replied.

And that was it.

There was no warm rush of recognition and approval, but there did not have to be. None of them could imagine any better pairing than this boy and this wand.

They went back up to the first floor at a different pace.

The hum of magic in the air, once they walked back around the store’s counter, had calmed down to normal levels, and Hersheba composed herself.

They hesitated just a moment at the counter.

“I didn’t break anything,” the child said.

“That’s true,” Evergreen said. “If you promise to keep that up until you start school, I guess I’ll have to let you keep it.”

The child grinned wide and nodded, and so Evergreen took the sycamore wand and held it out together with his own.

“…Legally, we are not allowed to sell a wand for a child under the age of ten,” Hersheba said, hesitant to deny any wizard a wand that had already chosen them.

“Then of course we will not,” said Mr Ollivander, a smile on his face. Then he fixed Evergreen with a stare. “You came here to buy a single wand for yourself, yes? But I don’t believe your wand was even mine to sell. You can take it, but I will not take payment for it. I will sell you a single wand today, and if you choose to use another, that is not on me.”

The child giggled into his hands. Evergreen grinned gleefully, paid eleven galleons for the sycamore wand, and left the shop

The two people left in the shop silently began to put the discarded wands back into their places. It was simple, methodical, calming work, and it was over far too quickly.

“I think I will retire,” Mr Ollivander said eventually. “I believe you still have work to do.”

She nodded acquiescence and turned towards the front door when he had left to see yet another set of parents with their first-year-age child in tow walk in the door. For once, she thought as she stalked in from among the shelves and startled the family, the chatter of the outside world might even be welcome.

\---

Thomas was giddy. More than anything else, he was giddy.

Having received final proof just a few weeks ago that not only did magic exist in the world, he was one of the people who could use it, Diagon Alley was what made it feel real.

All the little things, the ruined books he cried over that were just fine the next day, the school bus that stalled at the stop just long enough for him to catch it, the cockroaches that never touched his stuff even when the house was infested with them, those things he could rationalize. He could imagine he had imagined them, or that there was some rational explanation. Even the frazzled woman calling herself a witch appearing on their doorstep with a letter written on parchment and a long and fascinating explanation was hard to believe. Over the time since then, Thomas had repeatedly asked his parents whether it had actually happened just to make sure it had not been just a very vivid dream.

This though, the undeniable magic of this place made it all settle in his mind. He stared through the windows of a shop selling beetle eyes and pickled slugs, and the lump in his throat informing him that he was just going insane dissolved. Diagon Alley was colourful and gorgeous, and he stared and stared and stared.

Bookstores with titles that seemed too fantastical to be true (he glimpsed one in black leather that said ‘Bones in Potions and Alchemy’, and he knew he would want more money for things in this place than he was likely to ever have,) people selling protective charms on the street, creatures that were definitely not human weaving through the crowd, a woman with a fish on a hat that sang sea shanties. They stopped in front of the most intimidating bank building Thomas had ever seen, though to be fair, he had only ever seen one bank before and was not quite sure what was the norm.

His dad stopped, swallowed deeply, and asked for a minute.

If Thomas was giddy, Theo was anything but. He was a muggle to the core, and while he would support his son in anything, he was still reeling from the first shock of finding a witch at his doorstep. The thought of casually walking into a building that all but threatened to kill thieves at the doors… well, he needed a moment to gather himself.

Thomas was fine with waiting. It gave him more time to watch, though he also wanted to go see what Gringotts was like on the inside. He could just barely see the… goblins, she had said it was that worked there, from where he stood, and he wanted to look closer.

As he was craning his neck to see if he could get a better view, the boy approaching him went unnoticed until there was only a meter left between them.

“Hey, you guys need help?” the boy said, and Thomas damn near jumped out of his skin.

The boy was probably around Thomas’s age, though a little shorter, unremarkable appearance, with brown fluffy hair and a plain white T-shirt that still somehow managed to look more expensive than Thomas’s own. The look in his eyes was intense, his smile was sharp, and the tilt of his head put Thomas in mind of the side alleys he had glimpsed on the way to the bank that were dark as dusk despite the gleaming sun. The boy also stood hand in hand with a young child, who grinned like the sun itself.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said, looking back at where his dad looked decidedly pale. “I think we can manage?”

“Hmm-m,” the boy hummed. “Muggle-born, first day in the magical world?”

Thomas grinned sheepishly and scratched his neck. “Is it that obvious?”

The boy grinned back, sharply and slightly off. “You were staring and your father looks like he’s just been dragged through a spell specifically trying to make him forget its existence. You could’ve just never been in the city before, but this time of year this is a better guess.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Thomas said. “You’re also here for your school stuff, or…”

The boy nodded. “Yeah, just gotta get some more cash first. You’re exchanging yours for a currency that actually works, I figure.”

Thomas nodded slowly and glanced back at his dad again, who seemed to be calming down a little. Part of him wanted to grab his dad’s sleeve and drag him along as fast as possible, and another desperately wanted to know everything about what felt so weird about this boy.

The boy suddenly thrust his hand out. “Right, ‘scuse me, I’m Tyrone Evergreen, and this is Alvie.” He gestured to the kid, who looked like he might have just elbowed him in the side. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thomas,” Thomas answered, and took the hand. “Thomas Strange. Nice to meet you too.”

Tyrone tilted his head to the other side and furrowed his brows, and Thomas sighed internally. He was more than familiar with people teasing him about his name, but Tyrone just said, “Are you _sure_ you’re muggle-born? Because that is a very wizard name.”

“Oh,” Thomas said, and then he remembered to pull his hand back from the handshake, which had honestly gone on for a little too long. “That’s good. I mean, are weird names common here, or…? Er, I mean, no, definitely muggle-born.”

Tyrone laughed. “Oh, you have no idea.” Then he addressed the kid at his side. “What was the name of that woman we met last year, again?”

“Lizabella Scorpelflee,” the kid answered, and giggled. “Her hair was full of bugs too.”

“You see?” Tyrone told Thomas. “You’re basically normal here. Hell, people might assume you’re from some old wizarding family and you’ll end up facing _less_ discrimination than you would otherwise.”

“Who knows,” Theo said, having regained some colour, though his smile was still rather frail. “Maybe we are, and just lost the spark. Would explain a few things.” He briefly ruffled Thomas’s hair.

“You never know,” Tyrone said. “So anyways, you want to go with us to get your stuff sorted out? It’s a busy time of day, and the goblins are always happy to get to do two trips at once, to cut down on time.”

Theo nodded almost a little too quickly and gratefully at the offer.

Thomas wondered for a moment if his dad could even sense the weird, dark feeling he got off Tyrone, or if this was another magic thing, or just something he was imagining, but he found himself grateful too when they finally started moving and the hall beyond the doors of Gringotts came into view.

The hall was huge, ceiling domed far above them. Dozens, maybe a hundred doors along the walls opened and closed regularly to admit people through. Ahead of them, a single long counter ran the length of the room. The marble floor was smooth beneath their feet, and their shoes made clear tapping footsteps against it that Thomas suspected would have echoed against the walls if not for the noise of the crowd.

Beside the room, the crowd was the most interesting thing. Hundreds of people of all kinds of interesting shapes and sizes walked back and forth, lined up by the counter and being lead around by the goblins, and the goblins were something else again. One had bowed them in by the door and Thomas had caught himself too late not to stare. They were all business, working diligently at the counter and regarding their clients with the same cold efficiency they did their piles of actual gold coins and other valuables. Here and there, he glimpsed what looked to be non-goblin employees, but the vast majority of them were goblins.

His dad held his hand in a vice grip, obviously feeling very far out of his depths, but Tyrone walked with a casual confidence that made it easy to follow him.

They walked up to a goblin behind the counter who seemed busy idly reading a document, but was otherwise unoccupied. Tyrone stopped in front of… him? All the goblins appeared male, but they looked strange enough that it was hard to tell. Tyrone stopped in front of the goblin and waited politely

The goblin noticed them after a few moments, and looked up. The moment he saw Tyrone, his eyes widened and he hastily folded up the document and put it down.

“Ah, Master Evergreen, forgive me the distraction,” he said. “We have been expecting you.”

Tyrone grinned. “Ominous as always, Pirkratt. I hope you have; I did give word we were coming, after all.”

The goblin nodded gratefully. “Then tell me, what can we do for you today, sir?”

Thomas glanced around the room curiously. The goblins behind the counter seemed mostly cold and professional, efficiently directing people around, but this one, Pirkratt, was smiling. Admittedly a smile filled with small, sharp teeth, but a smile.

Tyrone was smiling too. His teeth were flat, normal human teeth, and they did not suit him at all. “Oh, nothing big,” he said. “We need to get down to my vault, is all. I was wondering, though. Think you could help these guys exchange their money while you’re at it?”

“Certainly.” Pirkratt threw Thomas and his dad a brief, calculating look. “If it will not trouble you?”

Tyrone casually waved him off. “Nah, we’re not busy. Take your time, don’t worry.”

Pirkratt then turned his attention to Theo, and Thomas felt the grip on his hand jolt in surprise before it loosened, and his dad started nervously discussing their money with the goblin.

Tyrone was talking to his little brother, saying something or other in a low voice with a smirk on his face. The boy laughed in response, and Tyrone ruffled his hair.

Thomas showed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked around at the transactions going on along the counter once more. “They’re very polite to you,” he noted.

“Hm?” Tyrone looked up at him.

“I mean…” Thomas gestured vaguely along the counter. “They seem kind of… They’re a lot more polite to you than they are to everyone else.”

Tyrone shrugged. “I have a few titles.”

For some reason the little boy giggled.

“Really?” Thomas said.

“Yep.” Tyrone nodded, and then he said, “Noble titles are actually pretty common among old wizarding families. They don’t really mean anything, and some of them are dirt poor even with them, but they’re a thing.”

“Cool,” Thomas said. “You’re, er, from an old family, then?”

Tyrone looked him straight in the eyes, and a shiver ran up his spine. They were blue eyes, but a dark, solid colour that did not seem quite natural. “We’ve been around for a while,” Tyrone said.

Thomas broke eye contact first, looking over at his dad, who was just handing a small stack of money over to Pirkratt. He had looked into those eyes for no more than three seconds, yet it felt as if it had been a staring contest. One he had lost.

“Yeah?” Thomas said, still looking away and pulling at the collar of his shirt. It abruptly felt a little too small. “How long?”

“Well…” When he looked back, Tyrone was smiling again, and the worst of the feeling had passed. “Our vault is one of the oldest ones in the bank.”

“You’re serious?” Thomas asked, eyebrows raised in surprise and curiosity despite the cold sweat inexplicably running down his back.

“Completely. We helped build it, though you won’t ever hear any goblins admitting that. Anyways, I think we’re about ready to go.”

Thomas looked to his dad again to see that another goblin had materialized next to them, standing on their side of the counter this time.

“Kark will accompany you down to your respective vaults,” Pirkratt said. “Unless you would prefer separate rides, sir.”

“That is perfectly acceptable. Thank you,” Tyrone said, nodding to the goblin behind the counter.

The new goblin, Kark, bowed and gestured them towards one of the walls full of doors. “If you would follow me, Master Evergreen.”

Tyrone gave a little wave and they walked out the nearest door, and the mood changed abruptly. Where the hall had been bright marble and golden embellishments, they were now in a dim, cold stone passage with a set of rails coming out of a torch-lit tunnel.

With a snap of his fingers, Kark summoned a cart that came hurdling up the rails and screeched to a halt in front of them. Tyrone almost immediately walked up and lifted his little brother into it.

“Come on guys. This’ll be an interesting ride.”

Thomas glanced at his dad, who glanced back. The cart did not in any way look safe, but, well, magic. It probably was.

Once they had all climbed aboard, Kark followed them, carrying what looked like a storm lamp. He left it unlit at the floor of the cart, and then they suddenly shot off at breakneck speed.

Thomas broke out laughing, mostly from terror, as they flew by twists and turns more quickly than he could count them. “Where are we going!?” he shouted over the wind.

“Vault 966!” Tyrone shouted back. He sat casually leaned back against the cart as if it was a lounge chair. “It’s one of the ones they keep the bank’s money in, so you can get your exchange!”

As quickly as the trip had started, it stopped, the cart nearly throwing them all out as it screeched to a stop in front of a pair of imposing doors.

“Please stay here wile I get your money,” Kark said. He nimbly leapt out of the cart and walked over to the doors. He spent a moment doing something they could not see, and then he disappeared through the doors.

Thomas’s dad stumbled out of the cart seconds later, then leaned on it with a shaking arm and tried to catch his breath without losing his lunch. “That,” he said, swallowing. “That was bad.”

“It’s awesome!” the kid exclaimed. “It gets even better deeper down. Sometimes they have loops!”

Theo had no answer for that, and so just stared numbly.

“Why would they want loops?” Thomas asked, slightly dubious.

“Security measure,” Tyrone shrugged. “If people are dizzy and throwing up, they’re not about to steal anything. Don’t worry. They almost never take those routes unless they’re worried you’re a thief, and you don’t look like one.”

“That’s good,” Theo said weakly. “Anything else horrible I need to worry about?”

The kid chewed his lips and looked up, visibly thinking. “Umm, I don’t think so, ‘s long as you don’t fall. They don’t even have dragons in here anymore.”

“Dragons?” Thomas sat up, all nausea forgotten. “Really?”

“Yep,” Tyrone said. “They really did stop using those for guards, though. After someone used one of them to break out during the war. Tore down the whole facade on the building.”

“You’re kidding,” Thomas said, almost laughing from glee.

Tyrone gave a predatory grin. “I’m not. It is technically possible to break into this place, but it’s almost always spectacular when it happens, and it never happens twice the same way. This one’s probably in your history books, so you can check that out when you get them.” He tilted his head a smidge. “I actually think I heard that one of the guys who did it is a substitute teacher at the school sometimes, so you might even get to meet him.”

Thomas could only laugh at that. Either way, this was when Kark came back and handed his dad a bag full of gold, and so easily ended that conversation.

“And now to the Deep Vaults, yes?” Kark said, ominously.

“Yes please,” Tyrone answered. “The Lightedge Vault, deep levels.”

Kark nodded, everyone got back in the cart and they set off again.

The pace seemed slower now, but still too fast to be reasonable under any circumstances. Thomas’s dad was white as a sheet, gripping the sides of the cart until his knuckles whitened. Thomas himself hunkered down and gripped the cart almost as hard, straining to watch the rails ahead of them. The little boy stood on his tiptoes, enthusiastically leaning out over the edge and whooping at every turn, with only Tyrone’s hand firmly hooked into his belt to keep him from falling. Tyrone, like Kark, was entirely unbothered.

The rails had been sloping downwards from the beginning. As they passed through the maze and the turns and intersection became less frequent, the slope increased, until they seemed to be falling as often as they were driving. They passed by vaults with intricate carvings on their doors, over ravines into a void below, and through passageways so narrow the cart threw sparks where it hit the walls (Tyrone casually pulled his brother closer.) Still they plunged deeper.

They passed through a stretch where the stones looked less like walls than they did teeth, reaching for them, and Kark lit the storm lamp. Soon after, there were no more torches to light their way, and they could only see by that one, flickering light.

The trail wound down and down, the forks in the road thinning out and the cart slowing down. Soon they were going slowly enough that talking without shouting would be viable, yet no one said anything.

The caves around them were dark as night, the light from the lamp only occasionally reaching walls and heavy, unused vault doors. The rails levelled out, and they passed through expanses that sounded from the echoes like vast, empty caverns, knife-edged crystals growing from the floor around them. They turned a bend and were suddenly rolling alongside the shoreline of a dark lake.

The cart did not screech to a stop this time. It let its momentum bleed out until it parked neatly just at the end of the rails.

“Whoa,” Thomas breathed.

In front of them, a pair of huge doors looked to be embedded in the rock, more as if they had been halfway excavated out than built into it. There was a symbol carved across the top half of them, one that implied sharp things and water, the chill up your back on dark, lonely nights and the sight of glowing eyes in the forest. It slipped from his mind the second he looked away. The mere presence of those doors in his vicinity made something in him scream ‘danger’. He wanted desperately to see what was on the other side.

Tyrone climbed out of the cart and turned around to stop the kid from doing the same. “No,” he said.

“But Tyrooone,” the kid complained. “I want to come too!”

“You stay out of that vault until I know you won’t touch anything that’ll vaporize you,” Tyrone said. Then he continued when the kid opened his mouth to retort, “And don’t argue with that after what happened at the wand shop.”

The kid closed his mouth with a click of his teeth and sat down, pouting.

Thomas saw a chance and took it before he could think too hard about it. “Um, can I come?”

Tyrone blinked, and looked at him. “What?”

“Can I-” He took a deep breath. Well. He had already said it. “Can I come with? To see the vault? I promise I won’t touch anything.”

Tyrone considered him, expression blank. “Well,” he said, eventually. “If you really won’t touch anything unless you’re absolutely sure it won’t hurt you, and your father says it’s alright, I guess that’s fine.”

Thomas immediately turned to his dad while behind him, the kid complained again. “What? Come on! You trust him more than you trust me?”

His dad looked dubious. Behind him, he heard Tyrone answer. “That’s not it. For one thing, I know for sure you can’t be trusted with this, which makes him more likely to be trustworthy by default. For another, if you’re vaporized, it’s my responsibility and I’ll be really sad, because I love you. If he’s vaporized, it’s his own responsibility and also I won’t care.”

Thomas’s dad looked at him and raised a concerned eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

Thomas glanced back at where Tyrone looked impassively at him, then at the doors that seems to have walked right out of his most implausible fantasies. Then he looked back. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure. I’ll be careful.”

His dad closed his eyes and sighed. “Alright. Just- Be _really_ careful.”

“Let’s go then,” Tyrone said, and started walking towards the doors again.

Thomas got out of the cart and scrambled after him.

The doors had no visible opening mechanism that Thomas could see, but Tyrone licked his middle finger and traced a circle across the surface, then he laid his hand flat in the middle.

A ripple of something seemed to spread out across the doors, something in the black surface inverting itself and then turning back. The next thing Thomas thought was that he could not understand how he had not seen the plain, normal-sized door embedded in the larger doors before. Tyrone turned the handle and they entered.

Somehow, the collection of bones longer than Thomas was tall standing just beside the door was entirely unsurprising. Tyrone walked purposefully deeper into the vault, and Thomas lingered by the door, looking at everything, but careful not to touch anything.

There were tables stacked high with items of various kinds, bookshelves with books and scrolls with titles he mostly could not read, one giant, empty cage standing on the floor. It looked like something had tried to scratch its way out of it, and almost succeeded. There were weapons hanging on the walls, from intricately carved spears to a collection of machine guns that looked like they had last been used in world war one.

He leaned closer to a table to see a miniature pyramid, apparently lined with gold and built out of teeny tiny pieces of rock. A simple picture frame showed a man standing on the edge of a cliff in a sunset, and only the faint movement of his hair in the wind showed that it was indeed a magical picture. A cup filled with pens, each topped by an ornate animal head in what looked like bronze. Among them were several whose needle-sharp teeth had dark stains.

What finally caught his attention was something that looked like a snow globe. It was a smooth glass ball on a stand, within which something was floating; a spherical, dark, gently wobbling something, flecked with pinpricks of light so small he was not entirely sure they were real.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Tyrone came back into view, tucking a small moneybag into his pocket. “That?” he asked. “That’s a universe. A small one. It’s probably safe to touch, though if you break it, our own universe might just fall apart.”

Thomas’s fingers were halfway to the glass when he yanked them back. “Oh,” he said.

Tyrone smiled at him. It looked sharper than it should be. “It’s very unlikely, of course. The casing isn’t easily breakable, and even without that it’ll probably just dissolve away, but still. Should we go?”

Thomas just nodded.

The trip back to ground level passed quickly and haphazardly. The goblins bowed at them as they went, and then Tyrone bid them farewell, the kid waving at them before they were both gone in the crowd.

Thomas and his dad stood at the bottom steps of the bank for a few minutes, not saying much at all. Then Theo cleared his throat and unfolded their shopping list.

“So,” he said. “Should we just start at the top?”

Thomas nodded mutely and followed him down the street as he looked around, looking for the signs of the stores they had been recommended.

In the privacy of his own mind, Thomas thought that he would at least try not to have too much to do with the Evergreens if he could help it. He also had a feeling that it was a battle he had already lost.

\---

Tyrone Evergreen had a train compartment to himself. He did not mind it much. In fact, he hardly noticed it. People walking through the train looking for empty seats glanced into his compartment, got a funny feeling they should be somewhere else, and left.

If he had remembered that this behaviour was unusual, he might have tried to fix it, but for now, he figured he would make enough friends once he got to the school, so he kicked back and covered the empty seats in candy wrappers.

At times, he talked to himself, unless he was talking to something else, invisible to human eyes. At times, he leant back, unfocused, as if he was somewhere else entirely. Not that being two places at once was difficult for him, but it could be distracting at times. The landscape passed by his window and the sky slowly turned black.

He shared a boat across the lake with a girl named Elizabeth, who did not say a word to him and kept throwing him suspicious glances. He might have purposefully unnerved her with a smile or two, but certain temptations are irresistible.

Then came the hall. And the Sorting.

Elizabeth was sorted Slytherin, and she looked at him as if _he_ was the venomous snake from her seat at their table once he walked up to the stool with the hat on it.

“Oh,” said the voice in his ear. “This is new.”

 _‘Problems?’_ he thought at it.

“I’ll say,” said the hat. “I will sort any student that puts me on during the Sorting Ceremony, no matter who or what they are, but I do need something to work from. It seems I cannot see any of your memories.”

 _‘Yes, that would be problematic, wouldn’t it?’_ he thought at it. _‘Hmm. Okay, I think I know what the problem is. Give me a second.’_

Quietly and as quickly as he could, he collected a random selection of his own memories and organized them neatly before he converted them into a form that was a little closer to human.

_‘Is that better?’_

“Oh yes,” the hat said. “This should be more than enough. Now, let us see… You are presumably brave enough for Gryffindor, though I must question what bravery means when you have nothing to fear. Loyal, certainly, to those you choose, but I believe a Hufflepuff needs a certain amount of… cordiality. Still, someone like you could blossom in Hufflepuff.”

The hat chewed on its thoughts for a while.

“No, maybe not. You are cunning enough for Slytherin, but you have neither the personal ambition nor the willingness to use people. Ah, well. I suppose, in the end, you did come here to learn, more than anything else. In this case, it must be RAVENCLAW!”

Tyrone stood up and removed the hat from his head, let the chosen memories sink back to their proper places. He walked down to the table that had just broken out in applause, looked around at the countless number of students and thought, _Yeah, this could be good._


	42. Alternative Fuels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been without internet for a while now. This is not the only thing I've written, but you'll get the other one tomorrow.  
> Enjoy.

“Did it… run out of gas?”

Thomas looked at his girlfriend, who looked at the dashboard of her car, annoyed. Maria also leaned over his shoulder from where she sat in the back seat with the rest of their friends. Except Tyrone. He had decided to just teleport back instead of driving.

“Yes,” Elisha said. “Yes it did, apparently. This usually doesn’t happen.”

“I think you should generally check the gauge before you leave,” Eddy said.

“I know that!” she snapped at him. “I just didn’t think about it this time. We’re going through the woods. I figured it’d get some roadkill if it needed it.”

“Your car is seriously weird,” Brad said. “Do you at least have a container of extra gas in the trunk?”

“…no,” she said, now looking at least as angry with herself as she was with the Car. “I don’t suppose any of you have something to sacrifice?”

“Well, what kinds of things work?” Eddy asked.

Elisha shrugged a shoulder jerkily. “Live animals, good wine, probably blood.”

“Wonder how far it’d get on human sacrifice,” Maria joked.

“Two months and a bit,” Elisha said.

“Oh.”

They were all quiet for a few moments.

“Well…” Maria said. “I do have this big box of Yggdrasil. Think that’d work?”

“Why do you even have that?” Brad asked, halfway raising his arms in utter bewilderment.

Maria just looked at him with confusion, as if he was an idiot for asking.

“Don’t know,” Elisha said. “Let’s try it.”

After a bit of consideration, they decided to try crunching up the leaves and mixing them into a bottle of water, which they could then pour into the gas tank. They resettled into the car seats, and Elisha tentatively turned the key.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the Car woke up, entirely absent of its usual roar, and with a noise more like an out of tune violin trying to ask a question.

“Hey there buddy,” Elisha said. “How’re you feeling?”

The Car started rolling, unusually slowly and tentatively, accompanied by the sound of random keys being hit on a cheap piano, and banking heavily to the right.

“Not very good, then,” Elisha said, and patted the dashboard.

It picked up speed a bit, adjusted its course until it banked left instead, and headed unsteadily down the road. The passengers exchanged dubious glances.

The cheap piano sounds started ordering themselves into a vague tune. The Car adjusted its course again until it stared straight down the road, then rolled to a stop, and changed gears.

“Oh shit,” Elisha said.

Then they shot off.

They swerved from one side of the road to the other faster than you could blink an eye, only staying on it by some miracle, and possibly climbing half-way up some trees growing beside it for an instant or two before the Car adjusted back to the road. The engine blasted loud, obnoxious carnival music, and the passengers were either screaming or focusing on holding on for dear life.

At some point, they screeched past a police car, and the sirens were out of earshot almost as quickly as they appeared.

“At least he didn’t get your plates!” Maria screamed.

Elisha was too busy clinging to the wheel to answer her.

That was when they hit the town. Mostly literally.

A small part of Thomas’s brain busied itself counting up all the destruction of property they were responsible for. He also noticed that the Car seemed to be going out of its way to avoid people, going around or over them, to the detriment of everything other than people, and at one point driving vertically along the side of a building to avoid a class of pre-schoolers. Most of him was busy screaming.

A particularly wide swerve sent them straight through the park, crashing through half the park benches, a parked popcorn cart, four trees and out into the parking lot, where it got sixteen cars and most of the parking meters.

Then it crashed through a fishmonger’s stall, and a stream of ice and dead sardines flowed over the windshield, leaving a single shrimp stuck on a rusty crack in the frame, flopping about. After that, it finally turned in the vague direction of home.

The Car made a turn onto Moss Street, screamed past the various apartment buildings, crashed straight through the ugly fountain of a gnome riding a dog, and stopped, very suddenly, but neatly, in front of the correct building.

It took the passengers a few seconds of relieved bewilderment before they noticed Tyrone standing on the pavement with a hand on the hood of the Car and an amused and curious look on his face. Small fish and crumbling pieces of stone slowly fell to the ground.

No one moved, so Tyrone walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door, asking, “What are you doing now? And what smells funny?”

Elisha unclenched her hands from the wheel, one finger at a time. “Maria,” she said, “is never again allowed to touch my car.”

“That’s fair,” Maria said from the back seat, voice an octave higher than usual. “And that’s probably Yggdrasil you’re smelling.”

“Oh,” said Tyrone, grin spreading across his face as he looked over Thomas, who appeared to have looked terror in the eye and come out the other side perfectly unruffled, and Brad and Eddy, who were clinging to each other in the back seat. “That explains why everything feels so nice all of a sudden. I should probably leave. Maybe make sure you aren’t sued by half the town. You good?”

Thomas nodded slowly, still staring resolutely forward with blank, unblinking eyes. “We’re good. You have fun.”

“I will!” Tyrone said, and left.

“The next person who suggests this gets to be used as fuel,” Elisha said.

“That’s fair,” said Maria.


	43. Static Worms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here's the other thing I wrote during my internet-less time.
> 
> **!Trigger warning!:**  
>  Graphic depictions of parasites and descriptions of a surgery. If you have problems with parasites, you might want to read only the second part of this, or not read it at all.

Dipper’s day began normally enough.

He had been bored out of his mind for the last… unreasonably large amount of time, and so had decided to try the whole human thing out for a bit again. It was going surprisingly well. He was pretty sure around half his neighbours believed him to be some kind of vampire or something, which was a very distinct improvement from the last time.

Right now, he was headed home after grocery shopping, which was a perfectly mundane activity, even if his shopping list was mostly sweets and soda. It was a bright, warm spring day. The sun shone, the birds were singing, and the first few bugs were starting to buzz around. One had even stung him earlier.

It was a small, subtle thing. If he had been anyone but himself, he probably would not even have noticed it, but he was and he did. For a fraction of a moment he even considered letting it live, as a tribute to the pure nerve it took to sting him of all people, but no. Stinging bugs did not deserve his mercy.

He was just rummaging around in his shopping bag, looking for a small chocolate bar, when he felt something weird. It was almost like itching, a small movement just below his skin. He scratched at it while still focusing mostly on finding his chocolate, and diverted a miniscule amount of power towards removing the irritation. It was almost as if he reacted to the sting, even if the thought of him having an allergic reaction to an insect was laughable.

His efforts to remove the irritation did nothing. He furrowed his brows and paid more attention to it, but still most of his focus was on trying to get his chocolate bar out of the bag without tipping the largest soda bottle out of it.

Then there was another sensation. The smallest on feather touches on his power reserves, so much deeper than any part of his physical body.

He jerked his hand back in violent surprise, throwing the bottle wide and paying it no mind. By the time he realized exactly what was going on, it was already too late.

\---

The man they wheeled out of the ambulance looked terrible, arms twitching feebly and clothes splattered with blood. He looked like he was just coming out of teetering on the edge of unconsciousness.  Still, when his eyes cleared, they were open and attentive despite the trickle of blood running from them. He looked like he was following the conversations going on around him easily enough, but Maggie had learned never to assume.

“Mister Pines?” she said, using the name that was written on the ID in his pocket. “Do you know where you are?”

His eyes turned to meet her, and she was sure that yes, he was completely lucid, if in pain. “Emergency room,” he said to confirm her question. “I collapsed on the street and started bleeding, and someone called an ambulance for me.”

She nodded. “Very good. Now, do you know what’s happening to you? Would you be able to tell us?”

He nodded, and she let out a quiet breath of relief. Patients with strange unknown ailments did not happen as often as the medical dramas implied, but they still happened, and they were never fun.

“Static worm,” he said. “I need it out.”

She reconsidered her relief.

She knew what a static worm was, of course. It was one of the many things anyone who worked with non-human medicine had to know, but were unlikely to ever encounter. They were increasing in number, but still counted as rare creatures.

They preyed on shapeshifters. Any kind of shapeshifters, from werewolves through selkies to those strange, bug-like, subterranean things. They found their prey through unknown means, and would proceed to lay eggs in them, which would almost immediately hatch into the larvae the species was named after. The larvae would then somehow freeze the shapeshifter’s shapeshifting ability, no matter how the ability worked, and feed on the magical powers involved until it was fully-grown and ready to release its offspring on the world, all of which was more or less traumatic and possibly fatal to the host.

They also never preyed on non-shapeshifters, like humans.

“Okay,” she said, jogging alongside the stretcher as they moved him along. “Then I’m going to have to ask you some questions. They are only for your own good and will not be made official in any way in case you’re worried about hiding. Exactly what kind of shapeshifter are you?”

“Nothing you’ve ever encountered before,” he said.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “The more we know, the more likely it is we can help you.”

“My kind is very rare and practically invulnerable. We-” He swallowed, probably trying to get the blood out of his mouth. She wondered how much of his lungs was actually filled with air. “We don’t show up in hospitals very often. I’m sure.”

She nodded. Okay, unknown preter. She knew the procedure for this. “Healing factor?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Damn good one, but this thing’s stopping it. Just get it out and I can fix the rest myself.”

“That’s very good,” she said. Then she called out to ready the damn surgery room already before she turned back to him. “Anaesthetics that work on you?”

“Only one,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut in pain. “But its side effects would… complicate things. A lot. We’ll have to do without.”

“What kind of side effects?” she asked.

“I’d get very high, try and probably succeed in running away, and if you did manage to help me despite that, I’d probably immediately kill you once my powers came back.” He looked her in the eye. “We’ll do without.”

“Yes,” she said. “It sounds like we should. Will you be okay?”

The way he scrunched up his face showed clearly enough that he was not looking forward to the experience, but he nodded. “I don’t experience pain like you do. I’ll be fine.”

They finally got him wheeled into surgery and onto the table. They started cutting off his clothes and he complained about losing his favourite shirt. One of the students joked that if he could complain about that, he was doing fine.

“I hope you don’t mind we’ve got students observing, do you?” Maggie said. “This is a perfect opportunity to see an unusual case.”

“As long as you get this thing out of me I don’t care what you do,” he said.

Maggie absently noted that without his clothes he was more obviously unusual, lacking certain features human males tended to have.

“Would you be able to tell us approximately where it is?” she asked.

He nodded again. “Inside the ribcage, cosied up under the right clavicle.” He dragged his hand over to indicate the spot. “Crawled through my lung a few minutes ago.”

Powerful shapeshifters tended to have unusually good internal sensory systems. She realized he probably felt that quite clearly, and she tried not to cringe. Working in Emergency for a long time would harden anyone, but certain things still got to her, and parasites were unusually horrible.

“I love powerful healing factors,” the surgeon muttered, cutting into the skin of his chest with little regard for if he would be fine later. Maggie quietly agreed. It made things much easier when they wouldn’t have to worry about killing anyone on the table as long as they succeeded in getting the worm out. Honestly, for being a critical case with an unknown species, the situation was almost ideal. At least the patient was awake, cooperative, and had some knowledge of his own anatomy.

“Your limbs seem a little weak,” she said, partially because it might be important, and partially because Pines seemed like he could use a distraction. “Is that something we need to worry about?”

“I kind of half-assed the body today,” he said. “Wasn’t doing anything strenuous, so I skipped on a lot of the detail and compensated with my abilities. Paying for that now. Should probably warn you I didn’t fix up any proper organs either.”

“Yes, I see,” the surgeon said, having just broken through his ribcage with almost disturbing ease. They had an odd look on their face, and they hesitated for a few seconds, looking down into his chest cavity, before they continued.

“Er, are those lungs?” one of the students asked, pointing at a couple of vaguely lung-shaped, muscled organs, one of which had a big hole in it and lay flat like a punctured balloon.

“The heart isn’t plugged into anything either,” the other one said, pointing at a lump about the size of a fist whose only apparent function was to make the sound of a heartbeat.

The rest of the chest cavity was filled with some sort of blackish red goop, which might explain where the blood came from, what with the heart not working.

“I did say I was half-assing it, didn’t I?” Pines said. “I needed enough to sound human and not much more.”

Maggie had to admit that having the patient sass at them during the operation was a bizarre experience, especially with his insides open to the world and also apparently torn up from within, while she could see his one working lung-substitute expand and contract as he talked despite his chest being depressurized.

Then she was distracted by the surgeon swearing like a sailor. They found the static worm.

“Holy fuck,” she said when she saw it.

She had never personally seen a static worm before, and she suspected neither had the surgeon, but they had both seen the pictures. They were white, shapeless worms with sharp spines sticking out of them, varying in size depending on the host. They should not get much bigger than her pinkie finger. This one was as thick around as her wrist, and almost as long as her forearm. It curled around his uppermost rib and had its spines deeply embedded in the bone.

It also moved, squirming away from their attention with vigour.

One of the students had to go excuse themselves.

“Just…grab it?” Maggie asked.

“Just grab it,” Pines growled. “Get it out, before it gets worse.”

The surgeon only hesitated for a moment before they grabbed at the thing, shoving their hand straight up under the ribs, but the worm squirmed away. It broke off several spines and slithered out of the surgeon’s grip, down through the lung it had already passed through, tearing the hole much bigger as it went.

“Fuck! Get it!” the surgeon exclaimed.

Maggie grabbed a scalpel and stabbed at it, to which it reacted by wiggling behind the spine. Pines growled loudly and suddenly, and there was a sharp sound of something cracking. It might have been one of his fingers where he clenched them against the table.

The surgeon dived for the worm and just got their hands on it before it could disappear through the diaphragm, whereupon Maggie stabbed it through the middle.

It violently tied itself into a knot a few times, spraying goop and blood everywhere, before it finally stilled.

The surgeon picked the worm up and put it in a tray.

“You missed a few pieces,” Pines said, and then they all watched as he stuck his hand into his own chest and pulled out the spikes stuck in his ribs.

He dropped the spines on the table and let his hand flop back down.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m going to pass out now.”

No one particularly felt like objecting.

They all took a few moments to gather themselves before they put their tools down and started looking for the needle and thread.

“Do we even need to stitch him back up?” one of the students asked. “He did say healing factor.”

“Yes he did,” Maggie said, and pointed to the edges of his wounds, which were slowly starting to knit themselves together. “He was probably right too, but we don’t know what he is, we don’t know what this thing’s done to him, his entire ribcage’s cut open, and he’s passed out on the operating table. We’ve all heard stories of people with broken legs who think they can walk it off. Never take a patient on their word that they’ll be fine unless you’re sure yourself, and this time we’re not.”

“We stitch him up,” the surgeon continued, “as best as we can, and then we keep him under observation until he either wakes up or we’re sure he’s stable, to make sure there are no complications. If he’s fine when he does, he can walk.”

With that, they started putting him back together. Or trying to. Maggie picked up a big piece of unidentifiable something that had been thrown around during their chase through his chest cavity, shared an awkward glance with the surgeon, and dropped it somewhere around where the lungs should be. He was still breathing, somehow, when they were done, so they assumed it could have been worse.

\---

People on the street were staring. Of course people were staring, they were making a spectacle of themselves.

Lolonja sighed deeply and massaged her face with a hand, but said nothing. At least the hands were nice, if unusual. This whole situation was unusual.

The Master was unwell. That was the most unusual part of all. It happened, but very rarely and never for long. This thing that had infected him and tried to steal his power had left traces, and this time he needed time to recover.

She understood the instinct, to steal power. Anyone who had ever lived wild in the Mindscape would. Still, the mere concept that something so small could even dare to harm her Master made her angry. She was glad it was dead now. It deserved nothing better.

Most of her siblings seemed to agree.

The Master was unwell, but he was also recovering steadily, and at the moment he was staying in a human hospital. This was unusual, but also an opportunity, so Lolonja and several of her flockmates decided to go visit him, because that was what people did when their loved ones were hospitalized.

Unfortunately, the hospital did not admit animals. As a workaround, someone had the bright idea to disguise themselves as humans. Lolonja probably should have realized from the start how badly they would end up messing that up.

None of them looked human, that was for sure.

Groknar (the Destroyer) was a little over two and a half meters tall, had arms as wide around as an average child, skin as black as coal, dangerously sharp teeth and a set of ram’s horns on his head. Star (the Survivor) was about one forty, snow white skin with golden highlights in her hair, three fingers on each hand, a short tail and eyes that were bright blue from edge to edge.

No one else were much better. Lolonja admitted that the hooves she were walking on were not very human-like, but at least her eyes had pupils. Incandescence, who after an incident a few weeks after she joined the Flock would never again take a human-like form, walked beside the small group as a large, neon, rainbow-coloured poodle.

People were staring, and whispering. She swivelled an ear (also not human?) to listen. Everyone seemed to realize they were not human immediately, so that was a moot point. On the other hand, no one seemed to realize what exactly they were. Guesses circled around some kind of satyr subspecies, which was good enough.

Either way, the hospital came up in front of them, and they walked in.

They crowded around the front desk once it was clear, looming just a little over the receptionist, except for the couple of dreams, who could just barely look over the counter.

The receptionist’s eyes widened steadily as he looked between them, and he started smelling slightly of fear. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“We are intending to pay someone a visit,” said Devil’s Child, attempting to give a reassuring smile.

The receptionist flinched back at the sight of a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. “Okay,” he said, swallowing. “Who?”

Devil’s Child seemed to realize that he was not being reassuring, so he licked his lips with a forked tongue and tried to hide his teeth a little more when he continued. “He is likely checked in under the name Tyrone Pines, after an urgent surgery. It would please us if you would tell us where to find him.”

The receptionist gave another nervous glance at the sharp quills sticking out of Devil’s Child’s hair before he started tapping away at his computer. After a few seconds of that, he looked back up at them. “So, er, you’re his… friends?”

“He is our Master,” said Baaasly.

Lolonja punched him in the side and hissed, “You don’t say that to a human!”

The receptionist paled, and she cringed before glaring back at Baaasly. Baaasly just looked confused.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Humans get twitchy about the ethics of person ownership,” she said. “They tend to react badly to that.”

“How come?” Thalia said, looking up through the bright pink curls that hung in front of her eyes (and grew down her spine and arms.) “It’s not like humans can even own each other. They don’t work like that.”

“One day,” Lolonja sighed, “I’ll have to sit you all down with a history book and teach you some things about humans.”

She glared for another second, (and punched Killer in the ribs for good measure, as she had mostly been snickering and not helping at all,) before she shook her head and caught the receptionist’s eyes. “It’s a… mutually beneficial arrangement,” she said. “Don’t worry. We’d just like to know where we can find him?”

“A- ah, yes,” the receptionist said. “I, uh, I have the room number here. Just, er, you’re not allowed to bring animals?” he gestured at Incandescence.

Incandescence sat back on her haunches and looked very petulant. “But I don’t want to wait outside,” she said.

“I… guess you’re not an animal, then.” He looked just a little shaken, but he did eventually give them the number and instructions as to how to get to the room, and they smiled their thanks and left.

The next obstacle they met was the elevator.

Killer read the sign saying how much weight it could take, took a quick headcount, and crossed her arms (and claws). “We’re not all going to fit,” she said.

The group exchanged looks.

“I… suppose we could split up…” Lolonja suggested, dubiously.

They exchanged a few more looks before everyone ended up looking at Star and Thalia, their two bright, small, breakable dreams that had insisted on coming along and should definitely not be left alone in any way for any amount of time, lest they may get hurt.

“Stairs,” Groknar said.

“Stairs,” Lolonja agreed.

They took the stairs.

They found the room just as a nurse was exiting it. She closed the door, preoccupied by her tablet, turned around, and stood face to face with the group of disguised sheep.

She opened her mouth and made a choked squeaking noise. Then she closed it again. “Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t see you there. Can I help you with anything?”

“We are just here to visit Mister Pines,” Lolonja said before anyone else could say anything.

The nurse swept her eyes over them and cringed a little. “There is a visitation limit of three people, I’m afraid,” she said. “Some of you are going to have to wait outside.”

They looked blankly at her, and she faltered.

“I… really don’t think there’s enough room for all of you,” she said.

“It will work,” Groknar said, crossing his arms.

She swallowed, and stepped away from the door so they could pass.

The room fit them all easily enough, though it did look as if it was a little bigger than it should be, almost as if someone had changed its dimensions from the inside. The Master looked up at them from the bed, a book open in his lap, and he had a look of utter amusement on his face.

“Did you guys walk here like this?” he asked.

Incandescence jumped straight onto his bed, tail wagging like an electric fan, and licked his mouth. He grinned and pulled away just enough to give her a hug and bury his face in her fur instead.

“We did!” she said. “We got some very funny looks and Lolonja was sighing all the time, are you okay?”

He laughed. “I’m perfectly alright. I just need to wait until the block on my power disappears on its own, since I can’t burn it out myself without taking half the city with me. I’m not actually in any trouble. I hope you didn’t worry.”

“Of course not,” Lolonja said. “We just wanted to visit and bring you some snacks.”

Then they crowded closer around him and handed him what they had brought of chocolate, cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and the jar of pickled eyeballs from his pantry in the Mindscape.

At some point as they sat there in what was basically a pile on his bed, another nurse came into the room, looked at them, and backed out slowly.

They barely noticed. Hospital visits were fun; they should do them more often.


	44. Death and Dipper have a chat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Show of hands, who has read The Sandman?  
> The comics by Neil Gaiman, I mean. The ones where dreams are ruled by this guy who's kind of a dick but very good at telling stories.  
>   
> There was a request on the TAU blog to have Dipper chatting with Discworld's Death. Now, I like Discworld's Death quite a lot, but I always liked Death of the Endless better, so I'm afraid she's who you're getting.
> 
> Enjoy.

“It doesn’t really work like that, here.”

The young woman smiled. She had a kind smile. That was the first thing he noticed about her.

Her skin was pale, but not quite paper white. Her hair fell in long, messy black curls, but not truly pitch. When she shrugged in response to him, her black tank top and the silver ankh on a string around her neck shifted at the movement. Her dark, gothic eyeliner was carefully hand drawn on, a little spiral in the corner of her right eye.

She was beautiful, in a very human way. The very picture of life.

Her eyes were ancient.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I came here. When you’re everywhere, all the time, it can be hard to get a vacation, you know? Sometimes you just want to jump universe.”

He found himself nodding before he had even fully processed the statement. It was hard to disagree with someone with a smile like hers.

For a second, he turned away. If he looked at her for too long, it got hard to focus on anything besides her eyes, beside that casual warmth she shared so easily.

He looked out over the city instead. They had a good view from where they sat, at the ledge of one of the uppermost floors of a skyscraper.

Below them, thousands of people passed by every minute, milling around like ants on the street. Anyone with good enough eyes, or a pair of binoculars, would be able to see them sitting there. Him, with his wings splayed out behind him and his ankles crossed over the ledge, and her, with one foot dangling and her hands and chin resting on the other knee.

They would see a demon and a reckless human girl.

He took a deep breath to taste the power in the air, and knew that they were wrong.

“Is it better?” he asked. “Where you come from? Less messy?”

She hummed. He looked at her and she smiled as if she had known him his whole life.

“Not really,” she said. “There are always the outliers, the ones that fall through the cracks, the ones that don’t get all the way through and the ones that refuse to go at all. At least here, it’s no one’s responsibility. It’s just something that happens.”

“So…” he said, leaning on his hands and looking down at the street directly below. “If something goes wrong like that, over there, it’s your responsibility?”

“Something like that.” She leaned back against the steel behind them, face upturned and eyes closed against the breeze. “No one is infallible, but I try. The ones that are prevented from leaving can be difficult, at times. I don’t always try too hard, though.” She opened one eye and glanced at him, smile playful at her lips. “They all go in the end.”

He swung his feet back and forth and smiled back at her. His mouthful of sharp teeth, which would make near any human flinch, did not phase her in the least.

A dropping of pigeons flew by, dozens of wings beating out of tune, heading for a perch in some other place. The two of them watched in silence as the city was so undeniably alive around them.

“Everyone?” he asked.

She smiled. It was soft and quiet and exactly what he needed it to be. “Nothing lasts forever, Dipper.”

He had never told her his name. Maybe he should have been surprised that she knew.

The smile was always there. Every time he looked at her, she was smiling, and every time, it felt new, as if every kindness he had ever known wanted a chance to express itself through it.

A part of him wanted to be scared of her. He had never felt more at home sitting beside a stranger.

“Sometimes it feels that way, though,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap and looked at them rather than her. “I’ve been around for a long time already.”

“Lots of people have been around for a long time,” she said.

He shot her a quick, angry look, and her next smile was an apology.

“I’ll be around for _longer,_ ” he complained.

She looked at him.

He looked into her eyes and could not look away. She looked young, physically. The way she dressed, the way she moved and spoke all screamed _young adult,_ but her eyes caught his and he was glad he did not need to breathe, because they took his breath away. Ancient was the wrong word for them.

Endless.

“Someone has to be here to put the chairs on the tables and turn off the light as they leave,” she said. “I can’t be here to do that for you.”

She looked away, out over the city, and he could breathe again.

She continued without turning back to him. “You’re not the only one,” she said. “There are others that live at least as long as you will.”

He looked down at his hands and swallowed. It had been a long time since the last time he felt this small. “…It’s a matter of scale,” he muttered. “I still live at human speed, you know.”

She sighed beside him, and then she scooted over and bumped her shoulder to his. Her smile was friendly, as she leaned down slightly to look at his face, and her eyes were not quite as terrible anymore as they met his.

“Hey,” she said. “It’ll come. Don’t worry.”

“I’m worrying,” he said, but he smiled as he said it. A small, wry smile, but a smile nonetheless. “What’ll happen to me before then? How many people will I hurt?”

“There’s been quite a few already, hasn’t there?” she said, and she said it as a joke. “Do you remember them?”

“What, all of them?” he asked, and now he was really smiling, if only at the absurdity of the idea. “Hell no. There’s way too many, even if I don’t count California.”

“I guess there is,” she laughed. “It wouldn’t be very healthy of you to dwell on, in any case.”

He paused in wonder at her laughter for a moment. She made it seem so easy. “Do you think I should?” he asked. “Do you think I owe them that, after what I did to them?”

She shrugged. “Not my department.” The next smile she sent him made it sound like there was a joke there, just between the two of them. “And even if it was, I’m on vacation.”

“I see,” he said, grinning.

It was getting harder to worry about it all. There was so much life to her; there was no room to wallow in misery when she was around to smile at him.

“Well!” He pushed up until he had both feet on the ledge, and stood up. “You can’t spend your whole vacation watching pigeons from hundreds of feet in the air! You don’t have forever in this universe, so why don’t I show you around?” He offered her a hand.

She smiled at him, a wide and joyful grin, and grabbed his hand to pull herself up. “That sounds just peachy,” she said. “Where do we go first? I’ve always wanted to see what kind of fast food they sell on the streets of a city with this many species in it.”

He laughed, at her priorities and at the unapologetic joy of it. Her hand in his was a promise of something that could not be his for a long time yet, no matter how he longed for it, but he ignored it. They had bigger things to focus on, like pigeons, corn dogs on street corners and kind smiles.

Now, they had a universe to see. Everything else could wait.


	45. The goat at the end of your rope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ask. I liked the pun.

What do you do when you're at the end of your rope and all you have is a goat, you think, looking down at the goat chewing on the end of your rope.

Maybe it hadn't been entirely rational to follow your last piece of rope into the woods when it seemingly attempted to run away on its own, but it was, after all, the only thing you had left.

“Give that back,” you say to the goat. The goat looks up at you and keeps chewing.

Oh well, you think. At least it's attached to the rope now. You grab the free end and tow the goat with you out of the woods. It follows after a bit of mandatory struggling.

What do you do? Well, you find your ritual knife, of course.

The sacrifice is sloppy, but the circle is drawn in fresh heartblood, which is, you guess from how little the goat seemed to care, given willingly. Your plea is general enough that anyone can catch it.

All you ask is for someone to listen, demon, deity or other.

The answer is demon, of course. You expected little else, considering what you have to work with.

He fills your little room with dark smoke, obscuring the floor, which is just as well considering what it looks like in the light.

“You dare?” asks the demon.

“Nothing else to it,” you say. “I reached the end of my rope faster than I thought I would. Most of it has been eaten,” you say.

“Goat?” the demon asks, sympathetically.

You nod. He has experience with goats, it seems.

“So,” the demon says. “What is your request?”

You hold up the goat-free end of the rope and say, “I need more rope. I only have one end now, so I can't make them meet."

“I understand,” the demon says. “I will make you a deal. Give me the better part of this rope-eating goat, and I will leave you more rope in return.”

You agree. It is a good deal.

Your new rope is made of goat intestines. You are fine with this.


	46. Getting under your skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, [this](http://transcendence-au.tumblr.com/post/167160107362/mabel-is-at-school-in-piedmont-and-shes-having-a) was a good idea. Hope you like it, because I did.

“I hate this. I hate this I hate this IhatethisIhatethis.”

Mabel was staring at the mirror in the school bathroom, leaning on the sink.

They were alone there. She had run out in the middle of class, after one too many comments, one too many _sympathetic looks_.

Dipper hardly remembered what had been said. That was irrelevant.

Mabel squeezed her eyes shut and kept the words going, flowing together into a single meaningless stream. Her emotions stood out to his eyes like wounds in the air. Painful flashes of panic growing rapidly, small bubbles of pitch, blue-sharp hurt rising and bursting with nasty pops, all accenting a thickening haze of muddled anger and sadness and pain.

Just a few months into high school. It was not supposed to be like this.

“I hate this I want it to stop I wish it would stop,” she continued.

He had no idea what to do, so he hugged her from behind, burying his face in her shoulder and holding her close with his arms around her chest and his wings around her waist. It was all he knew how to do.

“I wish I didn’t have to, I wish _you_ could do it,” she said, and that…

That…

Tugged at him.

A wish like that?

This sincere?

Voiced out loud?

That

Felt

Like

Permission.

“Gaahhhh!”

TOUCH!

The next breath he drew burned like it was seared into his lungs. The sharp light from the ceiling lamp branded itself into his eyes, all sharp contrast and hard realness. The echoes of his own shout were too loud and not loud enough.

He was drowning in senses.

Everything was too much, and yet he wanted it so desperately he tried to take it all in at once, and was overwhelmed by the _realness_ of it all, from the pain of his fingers being clenched against the sink to the comforting scratchy feeling of his sweater against his…

Wait a second.

He was hyperventilating. Adrenaline rushed through his veins.

He calmed that down in an instant. He just had to think about it, and his body obeyed. It was easy.

He took a couple deep breaths, and slowly adjusted to the world very abruptly being _real_ again.

Eyes opened. Mirror in front of him.

Mabel stared back, eyes glowing yellow and slit-pupiled.

Oh fuck.

The real Mabel was floating up above his (her?) right shoulder, looking just as flabbergasted as he felt.

“Whoa,” she said.

“I had no idea I could do that,” he said, in a single, whooshing breath. “I didn’t mean to! I’m sorry, I think I can undo it…”

“No, wait,” Mabel said, reaching out to put an insubstantial hand on his (her?) shoulder. “Just wait a second, bro.”

Dipper grabbed her hand instinctually, and apparently he could do that, and he also knew that he could choose not to, could choose to pass straight through her like everything else would in this state, as it had with him when Bill had done the same to…

“Mabel?” he asked, voice wavering with more distraught confusion than he would have liked.

She put her other hand on top of his (hers?) again, and this was such a strange reversal of roles, her floating and insubstantial and him standing on the floor like a person…

“You don’t have to undo it right away, right?” she said. Then she looked away for a second, almost embarrassed, before she looked back. “I mean, you’re kinda, uh, possessing me now, right? And that’s actually perfect! ‘Cause I didn’t want to go back to class, and now I don’t have to, ‘cause I’m a ghost!”

“Mabel,” he said again, disbelief tinging the word. “Are you really okay with staying like that? It’s… I- I know it’s not… pleasant.”

“Pssh,” Mabel said, waving the sentiment away. “Hey, no more panic attack.”

“I… suppose that’s true.” Dipper almost smiled. It was. The colours of her emotions had followed her out of her body, and were now settled on a vague haze, still tinged towards negativity, but no longer boiling into painful bursts.

 “Of course! It’s me!” Mabel said proudly, putting her hands on her hips and curling her floating legs up behind her like a proper little ghost. “I’m always right. But enough about me, for now, how are _you_ doing, bro?”

(Things were real, he could feel things again, it was all real, it was all good, oh god this was just like Bill, it was _real_ , he could _touch things_ , he could _feel_ things, touch was good, sound was good, sight was good, pain was good, no it wasn’t, yes it was.)

“I’m… okay. I’m doing okay,” he said. “Had some minor sensory overload. I’m good now.”

“You don’t mind being a girl for, like, half a school day?” she asked.

Dipper blinked, then blurted out, “That was literally the last thing on my mind.”

“Okay, great!” Mabel grinned, then she got very close to his (her?) face and furrowed her brows. “But if you’re gonna pretend to be me, you gotta do something about those glowing eyes. Think you could do that?”

The answer sprung to his mind like it had been waiting for the question. _Small perception-based illusion centred on the face. Simple enough at full power, should be impossible in a form this limited, but limits no longer exist for you-_

“Yeah, I can,” he said. “Shouldn’t be too hard. I’ll just…”

He stared into the glowing eyes in the mirror and bit (her? His, for now?) his lip, concentrating.

The immense power that had been at the back of his mind for months, constantly threatening to overwhelm him, was distant now. The solid _realness_ of the world around him felt like a barrier between him and it, preventing him from reaching it as easily.

A trickle still came through when he pushed, tingling pleasantly through his body and leaving a wonderful burn on the inside of his skin.

Weaving it into the necessary shape around his eyes was easy, instinctive, and then his eyes looked normal again. Exactly like Mabel’s eyes usually did.

“Like that,” he said.

Mabel ooh-ed and clapped her hands. “Awesome,” she said. “Now no one is going to suspect anything, no matter how long we stay like this!”

Dipper’s objections died on his tongue as Mabel grinned at him. Instead, he nodded and tried to smile back.

He had no idea how to handle this.

Possession?

That was wrong. That was capital-b Bad, and Demonic, and Evil, and every horrible thing he ever remembered Bill doing, and it was too much like _him_ in ways that turned Dipper’s stomach. (Metaphorically. Literally, this was not his body, and he had an iron grip on it. No one’s stomachs were being turned here.)

On the other hand, he was not about to stab himself (even if that would probably feel _wonderful_ ), and Mabel was okay with it (even if this had to be terrifying for her), and he would give her body back the second she wanted it (despite how much he wanted to keep it forever, and how _easy_ it would be to keep it from her.)

The world around him was still too crisp, every miniscule crack in the tiling of the walls and speck of dust on the floor stood out too clearly. Even the sound of his own breath felt too loud, and the feeling of breathing was disturbingly unfamiliar.

And he loved every second of it.

If he was drowning now, that was only because he had been dying of thirst. The world was still too much, but he wanted it that way, he wanted the way it bordered on pain, filling needs in his mind he had not even been aware of.

He had not realized how much he missed such simple things as breathing, as feeling the air against his skin as he moved. There was a wonderful taste in his mouth.

Slowly, slowly, he settled into his own (Mabel’s) senses and could let go of the sink without the changing sensory input overwhelming him. Balancing was a little harder than he remembered it, but he got the hang of it quickly.

Then he heard approaching footsteps, stopping in front of the door.

 “Mabel?” said the voice of Mabel’s teacher, whose name Dipper had never cared to remember. “Are you in there?”

His heart tried to start racing again, but he kept it down and quickly cleared his throat.

“Yeah,” he said. “Coming!”

He almost stumbled over his feet when he turned towards the door, but he caught himself before he fell, and then he opened it.

The teacher stood outside, bluish grey clouds of concern hanging around him. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Dipper said, a little louder than he had meant to, so he adjusted down. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just… I needed a bit of air. I’m good now.”

The teacher stepped back and studied his face for a second. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

“What?” Dipper said, lifting a hand to his lips, and yes, that was blood.

At least that explained the taste. It was a lot nicer than he remembered blood to be. He must have bitten through his lip earlier.

No, no, not his lip. Mabel’s lip. He had to keep that straight. He was borrowing. Only borrowing. None of this was his.

He ran her tongue quickly over the wound on her lip to check it out.

“Oh, right,” he said. “I don’t think it’s very deep. It’ll probably heal up in a few minutes. Um, I’m sorry about running off; should we go back to class now?”

The teacher’s concern roiled around his head as he glanced between Mabel’s red-rimmed eyes and bloody lip, and the classroom down the hall. Small bubbles of green-tinted pink worry shot through it, likely as he thought about the class he had left to their own devices.

Coming to a decision, he looked Dipper in the eyes. “You know you can always come to me if you want to talk about something, right?”

Dipper nodded, and tried to look as un-troubled as possible. He was not quite sure if it worked. He had never been a great actor, and he was not sure if wearing someone else’s body was helping or making it worse.

Either way, the teacher seemed to accept it, because he nodded and started walking back towards the classroom.

Dipper took a deep breath, revelling in the feeling of air filling his lungs, and glanced at Mabel, floating beside him. She gave an encouraging nod, and he smiled back and followed the teacher.

The sounds of the classroom ahead flowed through his ears in a wonderful buzz of voices, as strong and as strange as every other sense touching him, promising hours more of the most bizarre experience he had been through since, well, since that summer.

He could get used to this.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In My Arms](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8313652) by [Beth_Mac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Mac/pseuds/Beth_Mac)




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